To hang his scalp on a hickory limb.
They went—when they came limping back
They carried their guts in a gunny-sack.
And busted noses and blackened eyes
And chewed-up ears were as thick as flies.
And before they could unbar their gates,
They felt his hobnails in their nates.
His eyes were blue as the ocean’s haze,
His hair was red as a dancing blaze.
He always drank his whiskey straight
And he had a gut that could carry the freight.
For music he had an elegant ear,
Especially after the fifteenth beer.
He’d sprawl on the throne with a stein in his mitts
And his feet propped up on a keg of Schlitz,
With a jewelled scepter beating time
To the beat of the rhythm and the rhyme,
While David on his harp would lean
Playing “The Wearin’ of the Green.
And Samuel swore by bead and bell
The kingdom was going straight to Hell.
Half the babies born in his reign
Had blue eyes and a crimson mane.
The reason Samuel didn’t enthuse—
He was making micks out of all the Jews!
Miser’s Gold
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"Nay, have no fear. The man was blind," said she.
"How could he see ’twas we that took his gold?
"The devil, man! I thought you were bold!"
"This is a chancy business!" muttered he,
"And we’ll be lucky if we get to sea.
"The fellow deals with demons, I’ve been told."
"Let’s open the chest, shut up and take a hold."
Then silence as they knocked the hinges free.
A glint of silver and a sheen of jade—
Two strange gems gleaming from a silken fold—
Rare plunder – gods, was that a hidden blade?
A scream, a curse, two bodies stark and cold.
With jewel eyes above them crawled and swayed
The serpent left to watch the miser’s gold.
Monarchs
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These be kings of men,
Lords of the Ultimate Night,
Kings-of-the-desert and fen -
Jackal, vulture, and kite.
Moon Mockery
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I walked in Tara's wood one summer night,
And saw, amid the still, star-haunted skies,
A slender moon in silver mist arise,
And hover on the hill as if in fright.
Burning, I seized her veil and held her tight:
An instant all her glow was in my eyes;
Then she was gone, swift as a white bird flies,
And I went down the hill in opal light.
And soon I was aware, as down I came,
That all was strange and new on every side;
Strange people went about me to and fro,
And when I spoke with trembling mine own name
They turned away, but one man said: “He died
In Tara Wood, a hundred years ago.”
The Moor Ghost
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They hauled him to the crossroads
As day was at its close;
They hung him to the gallows
And left him for the crows.
His hands in life were bloody,
His ghost will not be still
He haunts the naked moorlands
About the gibbet hill.
And oft a lonely traveler
Is found upon the fen
Whose dead eyes hold a horror
Beyond the world of men.
The villagers then whisper,
With accents grim and dour:
"This man has met at midnight
The phantom of the moor."
The Mottoes of the Boy Scouts
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If you lie not on the grass
Twins will never come to pass.
When the wind is in the south
Slap your sister in the mouth.
Be polite, you must enthuse
At scout-master’s home-made booze.
Always be quick and alert
Jerking up a lady’s skirt.
Always be polite, the more
If the lady is a whore.
When the man’s a dirty varlet
Be assured his wife’s a harlot.
Three men—a crook, a fool, a brute—
Thre girls—two fools, a prostitute.
Always be polite, you boob,
That’s a sure sign of a rube.
The Mountains of California
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Grass and the rains and snow,
Trumpet and tribal drum;
Across my crests the people go
Over my peaks the people come.
Girt with the pelts of lion and hare.
Plodding with oxen wains,
Climbing the steeps on a Spanish mare,
Soaring in aeroplanes.
Men with their hates and their ires,
Men with their loves and their lust
Still shall I reign when their spires
And their castles tumble to dust.
My Children
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Now God be thanked that gave me flesh and thew
And passed them down to my own brood— my word,
Forgive me if my sinful pride be stirred—
They make a sightly and a buxom crew.
Fair, round-limbed girls and stout broad-shouldered boys,
All firm of flesh and ruddy-cheeked and fine—
My Lord, forgive this vanity of mine—
What man but sight of his own brood enjoys?
I know the blood that courses in their veins,
The flesh that laps their bones so softly round.
And when their voices lift their soft refrains,
My heart with undue rapture leaps and bounds.
As who would not who owns such dainties—Cook!
An onion roast I’ll have today and look,
My four year old yes’t-een was tough as sin!
Look to it when you cook the second twin.
Lord, Lord, forgive my fond and foolish pride!
The youngest girl, methinks, had best be fried!
Mystic
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There is a strange and mystic land
East of the rising sun.
A dim sea breaks on a coral strand,
Stars lie spread on the silver sand
And sapphire rivers run;—
There is a mystic land
East of the sun.
Nancy Hawk – A Legend of Virginity
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Nancy Hawk spread wide her knees—
Red are the drawers below the skirt—
From Brooklyn Bridge to the Caribees—
Down by the slums the wenches flirt.
Her perfume scented the sea port town,
But no man took her bloomers down.
Collegians cursed her, yellow and pink,
For a slug of gin in a skating rink
Was all of the booze they had to drink.
She harried the rum-runners all to Hell,
And took their cargoes to guzzle and sell.
For all she had one word alone,
One hunk of dung in their faces thrown:
“The man that shall jazz me is not known!”
This is the tail of her fall, by heck!
And the long tool and the heavy neck,
And the man that raped her on the deck.
The drunk was over, the looted ship,
Stripped as bare as a flapper’s hip,
With drunken skipper and drunken crew,
Who swore till the ocean all turned blew,
Back to the four mile limit flew.
And Nancy Hawk sat on her deck
And watched the boozing couples neck.
Below, with steins for many beers,
Heeding naught to the sailors jeers,
Hovered flappers with wiggling rears.
One by one with shimmying flank,
They guzzled and guzzled and drank and drank,
And one by one passed out and sank.
Only a girl was left at last,
Holding on to the mizzen mast.
Sir Koocoo Kook was a mighty souse,
He sat in state in the bawdy house.
Little a rubber meant to him.
From one rim to the other rim.
Of his lordly breeches flung out wide
On the whore house bench was a tall man’s stride.
And his only sister stood that day
Drunk as a fool in the flying spray.
And all of the sailors acted gay.
Sir Koocoo lifted a gown of lace
And far away in a boozy place,
Nancy slapped his sister’s face.
Sit Koocoo boozed, the drunken knave,
And far away his sister gave,
A yell that the sea cried out to hear
As Nancy lifted a barrel stave.
She squawked as Nancy Hawk drew nigher;
Her voice was high but her dress was higher,
And Nancy laughed and whipped her rump
Until she thought it had caught on fire.
.2.
Sir Koocoo stood at the manor dance
And his balls were hard rocks in his pants.
And he said, “Go fetch me wenches five,
“That love a man with a goodly drive,
“Where the gonococci never thrive.”
And each pimp shrieks back like a flighty fool,
From the girls they get from the nearest school
And the voodoo work of the master’s tool.
But down by the beds where the girls careen,
The skirts rise and the teds are seen,
Yellow and purple and pink and green.
And the knees knock and the bellies bump
And nothing changes but the rump.
And the men whore and the girls roar
And squeal and scream and beg for more.
But down by the beds where the gonny flies,
Collegians whoop and yell and rise,
Eyeing their tools with wild surprise.
And down the plank of the liquor ship
There skips a girl with a stinging hip.
Drunken and bawdy, go in cheer,
At last there are blisters on your rear.
And Nancy laughs when the girl is gone:
“The man that shall jazz me is not known!”
Sir Koocoo never sleeps alone
And his balls are firm and strong as stone.
And the sheiks roar and the girls roar
And each man gets himself a whore.
And Nancy Hawk still sails the seas
And no man lies between her knees.
And the rumps are slipped until they chap
And nothing changes but the clap.
But down by the beds where the wenches dream,
The gowns are raised and the bare thighs gleam—
Sir Koocoo laughs to hear them scream.
And Nancy swoops from the Caribees
With a skirt that does not hide her knees.
Sir Koocoo sits in the manor chair,
Eyeing his tool with an evil stare.
And the skirts fall and the step-ins fall
And nothing stops him but the wall.
But down by the beds where the wenches run,
Sir Koocoo get on a roaring bun.
His tool is strengthened, his practise done.
.3.
Nancy Hawk swept wide the seas—
There are no drawers beneath the skirt—
Her dress not nearly covered her knees—
Down by the bed the wenches flirt.
She sailed where the wide Atlantic slants
And the men who saw her lost their pants.
Unt l one way with a wiggling hip,
She stopped to hi-jack a bootleg ship.
She bade it halt—the air turned bule
As oaths and curses and beer kegs flew,
And boarders swarmed upon her crew.
They did as noble as they were able
But the boarders drank them under the table.
Nancy stood up, with eyes of steel,
Her famous buttocks no man could feel
Wiggled behind her as she cam;
All of the men burst out in flame.
They drenched their smoking rumps in beer
But still her voice they all could hear:
“The man who shall jazz me is not known!”
They all passed out; she was left alone.
With his breeches down, Sir Koocoo stood:
“I am the man and I’ll do it good!”
Then the breeches clashed with a toss and flirt
On the shimmering silk of the knee length skirt.
Sir Koocoo all in worthy haste,
Turned her dress about her waist.
Then under his fingers suddenly
Her bloomers sank to her dimpled knee,
And there was naught between knee and waist,
And every sailor gaped to see.
Then out of his breeches, bright with hope,
He dragged—and he did not have to grope—
What looked like a full grown hawser rope.
Nancy cursed and refused to buck
As a rammer strikes, Sir Koocoo struck,
Pouring his loins in a single thrust;
Her buttocks smacked in the fore-deck’s dust.
The sky was blue like an old gin-mill.
The rum lapped softly, still on still;
And between the rum and the gin and the beer,
Nancy’s yells were brittle and shrill.
The day was still and crew was lit;
Nancy stood for she could not sit,
And between the sun and sea and the sky,
Her bloomers hung on the bowsprit.
But down by the beds where the wenches plead,
Only the bold collegians breed,
For the gonny clutches a strong man’s tool,
And the streptococci scatters its seed.
Nun
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I have anchored my ship to a quiet port;
A land that is holy and blest.
But I gaze through my bars at the tempest's sport
And I long for the sea's unrest.
Ocean-Thoughts
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The strong winds whisper o'er the sea,
Flinging the gray-gnarled ocean's spate;
The gray waves lash along the lea.
The lone gulls wings are high and free,
The great seal trumpets for his mate;
The high winds drum, the wild winds dree.
The gray shoals roar unceasingly,
Where combers march in kingly state,
The crest-crowned monarchs of the sea.
And now, along the lone, white lea,
The surges fade, the winds abate.
And the wide sea lies silently.
But far to islands, restlessly
Surges the tide, unreined and great,
Forever roaming and forever free.
And thus my soul, forever restlessly,
Longs for the outworld, vast, unultimate,
The vasty freedom of the swinging sea,
Forever roaming and forever free.
The One Black Stain
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They carried him out on the barren sand
where the rebel captains died;
Where the grim gray rotting gibbets stand
as Magellan reared them on the strand,
And the gulls that haunt the lonesome land
wail to the lonely tide.
Drake faced them all like a lion at bay,
with his lion head upflung:
"Dare ye my word of law defy,
to say this traitor shall not die?"
And his captains dared not meet his eye
but each man held his tongue.
Solomon Kane stood forth alone,
grim man of sober face:
"Worthy of death he may well be,
but the trial ye held was mockery,
"Ye hid your spite in a travesty
where justice hid her face.
"More of the man had ye been, on deck
your sword to cleanly draw
"In forthright fury from its sheath
and openly cleave him to the teeth --
"Rather than slink and hide beneath
a hollow word of the law."
Hell rose in the eyes of Francis Drake.
"Puritan knave!" swore he.
"Headsman! Give him the axe instead!
He shall strike off yon traitor's head!"
Solomon folded his arms and said,
darkly and somberly:
"I am no slave for your butcher's work."
"Bind him with triple strands!"
Drake roared and the men obeyed,
Hesitantly, as if afraid,
But Kane moved not as they took his blade
and pinioned his iron hands.
They bent the doomed man over to his knees,
the man who was to die;
They saw his lips in a strange smile bend,
one last long look they saw him send,
At Drake his judge and his one time friend
who dared not meet his eye.
The axe flashed silver in the sun,
a red arch slashed the sand;
A voice cried out as the head fell clear,
and the watchers flinched in sudden fear,
Though 'twas but a sea bird wheeling near
above the lonely strand.
"This be every traitor's end!"
Drake cried, and yet again.
Slowly his captains turned and went
and the admiral's stare was elsewhere bent
Than where the cold scorn with anger blent
in the eyes of Solomon Kane.
Night fell on the crawling waves;
the admiral's door was closed;
Solomon lay in the stenching hold;
his irons clashed as the ship rolled.
And his guard, grown weary and overbold,
lay down his pipe and dozed.
He woke with a hand at his corded throat
that gripped him like a vise;
Trembling he yielded up the key,
and the somber Puritan stood free,
His cold eyes gleaming murderously
with the wrath that is slow to rise.
Unseen, to the admiral's door,
went Solomon Kane from the guard,
Through the night and silence of the ship,
the guard's keen dagger in his grip;
No man of the dull crew saw him slip
through the door unbarred.
Drake at the table sat alone,
his face sunk in his hands;
He looked up, as from sleeping --
but his eyes were blank with weeping
As if he saw not, creeping,
death's swiftly flowing sands.
He reached no hand for gun or blade
to halt the hand of Kane,
Nor even seemed to hear or see,
lost in black mists of memory,
Love turned to hate and treachery,
and bitter, cankering pain.
A moment Solomon Kane stood there,
the dagger poised before,
As a condor stoops above a bird,
and Francis Drake spoke not nor stirred
And Kane went forth without a word
and closed the cabin door.
One Who Comes at Eventide
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I think when I am old a furtive shape
Will sit beside me at my fireless hearth,
Dabbled with blood from stumps of severed wrists,
And flacked with blackened bits of mouldy earth.
My blood ran fire when the deed was done;
Now it runs colder than the moon that shone
On shattered fields where dead men lay in heaps
Who could not hear a ravished daughter's moan.
(Dim through the bloody dawn on bitter winds
The throbbing of the distant guns was brought
When I reeled like a drunkard from the hut
That hid the horror my red hands had wrought.)
So now I fire my veins with stinging wine,
And hoard my youth as misers hug their gold,
Because I know what shape will come and sit
Beside my crumbling hearth - when I am old.
An Open Window
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Behind the Veil what gulfs of Time and Space?
What blinking mowing Shapes to blast the sight?
I shrink before a vague colossal Face
Born in the mad immensities of Night.
Orientia
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Castinet, castanet!
When the floating sun has set,
And the silver splendor falls
Of the moon on harem walls,
Hear the bangles clashing chime—
While feet flit in dreamy rhyme.
Dark eyes flashing in the dusk
Luring scents of spice and musk,
White roofs ’neath a gen-set sky,
Floating songs from the dim serai.
Castinet, castanet!
Through the years I hear you yet.
Through the years of toil and fret.
Castinet, castanet!
Poet
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My soul is a blaze
Of passionate desire;
My soul is a blaze
That sets my pen on fire.
Private Magrath of the A.E.F.
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The night was dark as a Harlem coon
Smoke and clounds once lin' the moon;
Flares goin' up with a venomous sound,
Bustin' and throwin' a green light around.
An', yeah, there was me cursin' my soul
For losin' meself from the raidin' patrol.
Creepin' along in the mud and the slime,
Cussin' and havin' the Devil's own time.
Smeared and spattered with Flanders mire,
Tearin' me clothes on the loose barbwire.
I'm crawlin' along, keepin' close to the ground,
When all of a sudden I hears me a sound.
I halt and I listen, it's too dark for sight
But some bird's ahead of me there in the night.
I reached for my gun—then I swear through me teeth
For somewhere the thing's fallen out of its sheath.
But before I can move, I hear feet a-slush
And something to meself: "Come right ahead Fritz,
I've lost me gat but I've got me mitts."
I sidestep quick as he makes his spring,
His bay'net flashes, I duck, I swing!
Flush on the jaw my right he stops,
Down in the muck on his face he flops.
I'm cursin' him for a bloody Hun
As I loosen the bay'net off his gun.
I feel for his ribs 'neath his tunic drab
For I've only time for a single stab.
I feel a locket a-danglin there,
I jerk it out, then a rockets flare
Limns it in light like crimson flame
And I see the face of a white haired dame
And German letters beneath it run,
Which I take to mean "To my darlin' son."
I haul that Hun up onto his pegs,
And I says, "Get goin'; and shake your legs.
Your line are that way, now get gone."
And I hends him a boot to help him on.
Saying, "Make tracks on your homeward path,
With the compliments of Monk Magrath."
Prude
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I dare not join my sisters in the street;
I think of people's talk, the cynic stare.
Fierce envy makes me scornful of their play,
And hide my lust behind a haughty air.
A Rattlesnake Sings In The Grass
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Oh, brother coiling in the acrid grass,
Lift not for me your sibilant refrain:
Less deadly venom slavers from your fangs
Than courses fiercely in my every vein.
A single victim satisfied your hate,
But I would see walled cities crash and reel,
Gray-bearded sages blown from cannon-mouths,
And infants spitted on the reddened steel.
And I would see the stars come thundering down,
The foaming oceans break their brimming bowl –
Oh, universal ruin would not serve
To glut the fury of my maddened soul!
Rebellion
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The marble statues tossed against the sky
In gestures blind as though to rend and kill,
Not one upon his pedestal was still.
Stiff fingers clutched at winds that whispered by,
And from the white lips rose a deathly cry:
"Cursed be the hands that broke us from the hill!
There slumber of unbirth was ours till
The gave us life that cannot live or die."
And then as from a dream I stirred and woke—
Sublime and still each statue raised its head,
Etched pure and cold against the leafy green,
No limb was moved, no sigh the silence broke;
And people walked amid the grove and said:
"How peaceful these white gods!—aye, how serene."
Recompense
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I have not heard lutes beckon me, nor the brazen bugles call,
But once in the dim of a haunted lea I heard the silence fall.
I have not heard the regal drum, nor seen the flags unfurled,
But I have watched the dragons come, fire-eyed, across the world.
I have not seen the horsemen fall before the hurtling host,
But I have paced a silent hall where each step waked a ghost.
I have not kissed the tiger-feet of a strange-eyed golden god,
But I have walked a city's street where no man else had trod.
I have not raised the canopies that shelter revelling kings,
But I have fled from crimson eyes and black unearthly wings.
I have not knelt outside the door to kiss a pallid queen,
But I have seen a ghostly shore that no man else has seen.
I have not seen the standards sweep from keep and castle wall,
But I have seen a woman leap from a dragon's crimson stall,
And I have heard strange surges boom that no man heard before,
And seen a strange black city loom on a mystic night-black shore.
And I have felt the sudden blow of a nameless wind's cold breath,
And watched the grisly pilgrims go that walk the roads of Death,
And I have seen black valleys gape, abysses in the gloom,
And I have fought the deathless Ape that guards the Doors of Doom.
I have not seen the face of Pan, nor mocked the Dryad's haste,
But I have trailed a dark-eyed Man across a windy waste.
I have not died as men may die, nor sin as men have sinned,
But I have reached a misty sky upon a granite wind.
Red Thunder
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Thunder in the black skies beating down the rain,
Thunder in the black cliffs, looming o’er the main,
Thunder on the black sea and thunder in my brain.
God’s on the night wind, Satan’s on his throne
By the red lake lurid and great grim stone–
Still through the roofs of Hell the brooding thunders drone.
Trident for a rapier, Satan thrusts and foins
Crouching on his throne with his great goat loins–
Souls are his footstools and hearts are his coins.
Slave of all the ages, though lord of the air;
Solomon o’ercame him, set him roaring there,
Crouching on the coals where the great flames flare.
Thunder from the grim gulfs, out of cosmic deep
Where the red eyes glimmer and the black wings sweep,
Thunder down to Satan, wake him from his sleep!
Thunder on the shores of Hell, scattering the coal,
Riding down the mountain on the moon-mare’s foal,
Blasting out the caves of the gnome and the troll.
Satan, brother Satan, rise and break your chain!
Solomon is dust and his spells grow vain–
Rise through the world in the thunder and the rain.
Rush upon the cities, roaring in your might,
Break down the towers in the moon’s pale light,
Build a wall of corpses for God’s great sight,
Quench the red thunder in my brain this night.
Renunciation
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By the crimson cliffs where the spray is blown
By the silver sands and the rose red stone,
There bides a shadow—alone, all alone—
Waiting the day, waiting the day.
The wind comes out of the East at morn,
When the sheen of the sea is green,
The wind comes up from the Matterhorn
And the great red ships careen.
The gulls carved white in the blasting blue,
Their wings are silver and snow;
They hear the great tides thunder through
To beat on the beach below—
They hear waves hammer on sands below,
The clash and the clamor, the flee and the flow,
The magic and wonder of reef riven thunder,
The sands going under the spray white as snow.
The sunset is calling,
The dawn’s on the lea;
The silence is falling
Across the white sea,
And dim through the scorn of a morn on the Horn
The galliots, galleys and galleons flee.
To the ends of the earth
And the roads of the world,
To the ocean’s broad girth,
With their banners unfurled—
Will you laugh in the bend of a curse when the shout of the
Trade wind is hurled?
Or bide in the market place while the beard of a king is hurled?
Oh, follow the shadows
Across the high meadows,
To dreaming green uplands where walls of the mountains
Like purple tall towers
Encastle the hours,
And showers of flowers discover the fountains.
Follow the river
Where wild willows part,
Where shadow trees shiver
And winds start and dart—
The whiter the soul is,
The brighter the goal is,
The blacker the troll is
That eats at the heart.
Leave men to their labor with lust for a neighbor,
Leave minstrel to tabor, the king to the crown,
Great blossoms still quiver along the dim river,
And winds out of silence steal over the down.
There are Beings of twilight
As thin as the mist,
They seek not the highlight,
The stars they have kissed.
They rape not the grape,
Nor douse to carouse
With the shape of the ape
In the house of the mouse.
On amaranth mountains their pleasure is taken,
By rainbow fountains, by ghost winds shaken,
On the frosty cold nectar of stars their thirst is enraptured and slaken.
Leave life for men and follow with me
To the winds of the fen and the song of the sea.
Repenctance
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How is it that I am what I am
How did I come to fall?
Who was the man my soul to damn
Black in the sight of all?
Who was it came in my virgin hood
And in some evil hour
Turned all my life to bad from good
Bruising the tender flower?
I cannot remember the fellow's name
I had long ago forgot;
I was young and my blood was flame
The person mattered not.
I was hot as a blazing brand
Blood and body and nerve
Ripe to be plucked by the first man's hand
And any man would serve.
I have had my day, I have had my fling
Men have bowed at my knee.
I sit in the bars where the harlots sing
To sailors hot from the sea.
Sallow my cheeks and my lips have faded
Life's roses slip my clutch
But my blood is still hot and still unjaded
I can thrill to the deck-hand's touch.
Still I thrill to the hands of men
I love the contact yet
The breath that is laden with wharfside gin
The scent of tobacco and sweat.
Bristly jowls on my painted cheek
The obscene, whispered jest,
Calloused hands that lustfully seek
My out-worn charms to quest.
My by-gone life is dim and far;
I am content with gin,
A slug of wine, sometimes at the bar,
A room for the sailormen.
The Ride of Falume
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Falume of Spain rode forth amain when twilight's crimson fell
To drink a toast with Bahram's ghost in the scarlet land of Hell.
His rowels clashed as swift he dashed along the flaming skies;
The sunset rode at his bridle braid and the moon was in his eyes.
The waves were green with an eerie sheen over the hills of Thule
And the ripples beat to his horse's feet like a serpent in a pool.
On vampire wings the shadow things wheeled round and round his head,
Till he came at last to a kingdom vast in the Land of the Restless Dead.
They thronged about in a grisly rout, they caught at his silver rein;
”Avaunt, foul host! Tell Bahram's ghost Falume has come from Spain!”
Then flame-arrayed rose Bahram's shade: “What would ye have, Falume?”
”Ho, Bahram who on earth I slew where Tagus' waters boom,
Now though I shore your life of yore amid the burning West,
I ride to Hell to bid ye tell where I might ride to rest.
My beard is white and dim my sight and I would fain be gone.
Speak without guile: where lies the isle of mystic Avalon?”
”A league beyond the western wind, a mile beyond the moon,
Where the dim seas roar on an unknown shore and the drifting stars lie strewn;
The lotus buds there scent the woods where the quiet rivers gleam,
And king and knight in the mystic light the ages drowse and dream.”
With sudden bound Falume wheeled round, he fled through the flying wrack
Till he came again to the land of Spain with the sunset at his back.
”No dreams for me, but living free, red wine and battle's roar;
I breast the gales and I ride the trails until I ride no more.”
The Riders of Babylon
Table of Contents
The riders of Babylon clatter forth
Like the hawk-winged scourgers of Azrael
To the meadow-lands of the South and North
And the strong-walled cities of Israel.
They harry the men of the caravans,
They bring rare plunder across the sands
To deck the throne of the great god Baal.
But Babylon's king is a broken shell
And Babylon's queen is a sprite from Hell;
And men shall say, "Here Babylon fell,"
Ere Time has forgot the tale.
The riders of Babylon come and go
From Gaza's halls to the shores of Tyre;
They shake the world from the lands of snow
To the deserts, red in the sunset's fire;
Their horses swim in a sea of gore
And the tribes of the earth bow down before;
They have chained the seas where the Cretans sail.
But Babylon's sun shall set in blood;
Her towers shall sink in a crimson flood;
And men shall say, "Here Babylon stood,"
Ere Time forgot the tale.
The Road To Hell
Table of Contents
Along the road that leads to Hell
We strode, a merry band,
Sargon and Nero, Jezabel
Cain with his bloody hand
We shuffled through the scarlet dust,
A roaring, careless throng;
Red mountains bowed before our lust,
We shook the stars with song.
Red cinder showers rose and fell,
As with a furious din
We battered at the gates of Hell,
Roaring to be let in.
Then Satan rose in angry pride:
“Who comes in such rude way?”
“The souls are we, who would not bide
“Until the Judgment Day.”
“Let saints and friars meekly sleep
“Till Gabriel’s trumpets boom;
“But we, whose souls be red and deep,
“Go laughing to our doom!”
“Red laughter, salt with savage brine,
“From crimson seas of sin!
“Unbar the brazen gates, you swine,
“And let your masters in!”
“Shackled on earth by fate and star,
“We writhed beneath the rods;
“But by the gods, in death we are
“The rulers of the gods!”
The Robes of the Righteous
Table of Contents
I am a saintly reformer,
basking in goodly reknown
Sure of applaud of the righteous,
cinctured in purity's gown.
Young men and old men revere me,
women and girls out of school
Come to me telling their secrets,
seeking my counseling cool.
Little they know of my story
when I was the water-front's toast.
Back in the days of my glory
down on the Barbary Coast.
Young and my lips full and crimson,
flaming with passionate blood,
My love was the leap of an ocean,
my passion the swing of the flood.
Changing and varied my fancies
yet no woman ever gave more
For I joyed in the man on my body
just as much as the one just before
Ah, nights that were lurid and gorgeous,
under the bar lamps blaze
Flutter of cars on the table,
faces that leered through the haze
Of smoke drifting up from the stogies,
the red liquor flowing free
And the shout of the salty ballass
that sailors sang from the sea.
The money scattered like water,
the pagan thrill of the dance
The hand that groped in my clothing,
the burning and meaning glance
Then the look as the stair I mounted,
the man that left the floor,
The joyous and panting waiting,
the stealthy knock at my door—
What if they knew, the elders,
that I was a Barbary whore?
Hiding my charms with meekness
under purity's gown
Sure of applaud of the righteous,
basking in goodly reknown.
A Roman Lady
Table of Contents
There is a strangeness in my soul
A dark and brooding sea.
Nor all the waves on Capri's shoal
Might stay the thirst of me.
For men have come and men have gone
For pleasure or for hire.
Though they lay broken at the dawn
They did not quench my fire.
My pity is a deathly ruth
I burn men with my eyes.
Oh, would all men were one strong youth
To break between my thighs.
Any many a man his fortune spread
To glut my ecstacy
As I lay panting on his bed
In shameless nudity.
But all of ancient Egypt's gold
Can never equal this,
Nor all the treasures kingdoms hold,
A single hour of bliss.
Within my villa's high domain
Are boys from Britain's rocks
And dark eyed slender lads from Spain
And Greeks with perfumed locks.
And youths of soft and subtle speech
From furtherest Orient,
Wherever arms of legions reach
And Roman chains are sent.
Why may I not be satiate
With kisses of some boy—
They only rouse my passions spate
I never know such joy
As when through chambers filled with noise
Of wails and pleas and sighs
I stride among my naked boys
With whips that bruise their thighs.
I drift through mists red flaming flung
On hills of ecstacies
As shoulder-wealed and buttock-stung
They shriek and kiss my knees.
Romance
Table of Contents
I am king of all the Ages
I am ruler of the stars
I am master of Time's pages
And I mock at chain and bars.
Now, as when I sailed the world
Ere the galley's sails were furled
And the barnacles had crusted on their spars.
I am strife, I am Life,
I am mistress, I am wife!
I am wilder than the sea wind, I am fiercer than the fire!
I am tale and song and fable, I am Akkad, I am Babel,
I am Calno, I am Carthage, I am Tyre!
For I walked the streets of Gaza
when the world was wild and young,
And I reveled in Carchemish when the golden minstrels sung;
All the world-road was my path, as I sang the songs of Gath
Or trod the streets of Nineveh where harlots roses flung.
I swam the wide Euphrates
where it wanders through the plain
And I saw the dawn come flaming over Tyre.
I walked the roads of Ammon
when the hills were veiled in rain,
And I watched the stars anon from the walls of Askalon
And I rose the plains of Palestine beneath the dawning's fire
When the leaves upon the trees danced
and fluttered in the breeze
And a slim girl of Juda went singing to a lyre.
Roundelay of The Roughneck
Table of Contents
Let others croon of lover's moon,
Of roses, birds on wing,
Maidens, the waltz's dreaming tune,—
Of strong thewed deeds I sing.
Let poets seek the tinted reek,
Perfume of ladies gay,
Of winds of wild outlands I speak,
The lash of far sea spray.
Of dear swamp brakes, of storm whipped lakes,
Dank jungle, reedy fen,
Of seas the pound the plunging strakes,
Of men and deeds of men.
Prospector; king of the battling ring;
Tarred slave of tide's behests,
Monarchs of muscle shall I sing,
Lords of the hairy chests.
Though some may stay 'neath cities away,
To toil with maul and hod,
To outer trails most take their way,
To lands yet scarcely trod.
The torrent's might, the dizzy height,
Shall never bate their breath,
With desert's toils they match their might,
And hurl their mocks at Death.
The tropic creek, the jungle reek
That steams through sullen trees,
The boding wild where leopards shriek
Holds never fear for these.
Nor do they shrink from hell's own brink,
When kites low wheeling fly,
And circling near the jackals slink,
And sands stretch bare to sky.
Far swing their trails through calms and gales,
From Polar sea to Horn,
From bleak ice-glittering peaks and vales,
To sun-kissed seas of morn.
In driving snow, where artic floe
Surges though ice-reft straits,
Where bergs sweep southward, row on row,
And wind fiends shriek their hates.
Where the broad sun smiles on a hundred isles
With the long sea reach between,
And the lone gull wheels for a thousand miles,
And the reefs lift fanged and lean.
On Polar trails where the screeching gales
Bellow and roar and blow,
And the skies are gone while the firece wind rails,
And the path fades in the snow.
By atolls lean where ships careen,
In the sullen, still lagoon.
And crouching bushman's spear is a sheen
In the light of the shuddering moon.
In the marshy swamp, in the jungle damp,
Tall trees in marching lines,
That echo again to the tusker's tramp,
Where the tiger glides through the vines.
On mountains bleak, on cliff and peak,
From Pole to Pole and Line,
Adventure still they ever seek,
Adventure still they find.
Rules of Etiquette
Table of Contents
Rule I.
ALWAYS BE POLITE
If a girl stops you to talk while you are chasing your trains,
And it looks like they're going to lose ye,
Just up with your musket and knock out her brains,
Saying, "Miss, you'll have to excuse me."
Rule II.
NEVER BE RUDE
IF a tiresome guy should hapopen to call,
And stay and stay without leaving at all,
Just heave him out of the door on his dome,
And maybe he'll take the hint and go home.
Rule III.
BE CONSIDERATE OF LADIES
If you were going down the street,
And a pretty girl you chance to meet,
Don't hit her if she should you slight,
A swiftish kick is more polite.
Rule IV.
EXAMPLES
There was a guy named McDoodles,
With a face like an Austrian poodle's,
When folks said, "What a beeze--
You big piece of cheese!"
Why, he'd wallop them all on their noodles.
Rule V.
BE COURTEOUS
When a tailor's solicitor calls at your door,
Don't make him a greeting with your forty-four;
Don't give him a scowl and a horrible glare,
And say, "You poor fish! You bum! Take the air!"
He may be a bum and he may be a boob,
But it's none of your business if he's even a rube.
He's a human, although he may not look the part,
Either give him some clothes or a good running start.
Sailor
Table of Contents
I saw a mermaid sporting in the bay,
Far down, far down where blew no roaring gale;
About her snowy shoulders flashed the spray,
The waves played emerald at her sinewy tail;
She swam a jade and golden, star-set way,
Where all the rainbow colors seemed to play—
She vanished at the Swedish captain's hail
Who bid me go to Hell and furl a sail.
The Sand of Time
Table of Contents
Slow sift the sands of Time; the yellowed leaves
Go drifting down an old and bitter wind;
Across the frozen moors the hedges stand
In tattered garments that the frost have thinned.
A thousand phantoms pluck my ragged sleeve,
Wan ghosts of souls long into darkness thrust.
Their pale lips tell lost dreams I thought mine own,
And old sick longings smite my heart to dust.
I may not even dream of jeweled dawns,
Nor sing with lips that have forgot to laugh.
I fling aside the cloak of Youth and limp
A withered man upon a broken staff.
San Jacinto
Table of Contents
Flowers bloom on San Jacinto,
Red and white and blue.
Long ago o’er San Jacinto
Wheeling vultures flew.
Long ago on San Jacinto
Soared the battle-smoke;
Long ago on San Jacinto
Wild ranks smote and broke.
Crimson clouds o’er San Jacinto,
Scarlet was the haze—
Peaceful o’er calm San Jacinto
Glide the drowsy days.
The second, longer one reads as follows:
Red field of glory
Ye knew the wild story;
Blazing and gory
Were ye on that day!
Silence before them,
(Warriors; winds bore them!)
Red silence o’er them
Followed the fray!
Horror was dawning!
Furies were spawning!
Hell’s maw was yawning,
Fate rode astride!
Skies rent asunder!
Plains a-reel under
Feet beating thunder!
Death raced beside!
Doom-trumps were pealing!
Armies were reeling!
Satan was dealing
The cards in that game!
War-clouds unfurling!
Hell-fires were swirling,
Valkyries whirling
Fanned them to flame!
Redly arrayed there
Glittered the blade there!
Many a shade there
Fled to the deeps!
Wild was the glory
Down the years hoary
Still the red story
Surges and leaps!
The Sea
Table of Contents
The sea, the sea, the rolling sea!
High flung, wide swinging, so wild and free,
The leaping waves with their white-capped crest
The plunge and lunge on the ocean's breats
Like wild, white horses racing free,
With the swing of the rolling, surging sea!
The white sea cloud that drifts like a dream;
The sea-gulls that skim o'er the waves, and scream;
The dolphin's plunge and the petrel's nest,
That is borne to land on the tide-race crest:
And all that goes, from mid-ocean to lea,
To make up the rolling, the surging sea!
Can ye stand on the peaceful, quiet lea,
And gaze on the tumbling, tossing sea,
Out o'er the surge and the white waves' crest,
Nor feel a longing within your breast?
A drawing, a pull, be it day or night,
That tempts ye to dare the ocean's might.
I stood on the deck of a ship offshore
And harked to the awesome and deafening roar
Of the ocean waves when they struck the reefs,
High tossed on the tide like crested chiefs
Whose plumes toss high 'bove the battling hordes,
Where leap the lances and flash the swords.
And the mighty waves rose high and steep
To the hand of the waves that smote the deep.
And my soul leaped wild and my would leaped free,
To the leap and the swing of the rolling sea!
And my soul was freed with that ocean leap,
And it plumed the depths of the mighty deep!
Down, down, down where the mermaids ride,
Down where the things of the deep sea glide.
Down where the ships, long sunken, float,
War-ship and galley and coracle boat;
Down beyond reach of the storms or the tides,
To the coral halls where old Triton hides!
And I saw the mermaids and the mermen play,
The the kraken and sea-serpent locked in fray.
And all the ocean-marvels that be,
And the wonderful monsters of the sea.
I wandered 'mongst beautiful sea-flowers,
Where the castle built by the polyp towers,
Where the waters glitter with strange sea-jade,
And the sea-things swim through the deep-sea glade.
And then my soul came back on me,
Back through the surge of the swinging sea.
But still I gaze from the quiet lea,
And long for the swing of the plunging sea.
Secrets
Table of Contents
There is a serpent lifts his crest o' nights
And hisses in the darkness of my room.
His substance and the cloaking night are one;
His form is of the soft, thick, musky dark.
His strange eyes glimmer and his scales are loud
Yet none but I can hear—and scarcely I.
His gliding whispers shake my sluggish soul
With strange wild fires and lights of other dreams.
He loops himself about me in the dark;
I struggle with a strange, wild ecstasy
And seek, yet would not wish, to free my limbs.
Strange shudders shake my limbs at his cold touch
As coil on coil he laps my naked form.
Colder than ice he is, yet in my soul
He kindles fires more hot that Hades' breath.
With soft insidious whisper at my cheek
He lures me to the midnight's curious joys.
I rise and follow. All the land is still.
the crescent moon hangs breathless in the sky,
Whose crystal deeps are pierced with pointed stars.
Through woodlands silver black he leads me on.
Over the terraced swards where fountains dance,
Until the moon lights up a window sill.
My naked feet no hint of sound may make.
We glide together o'er the silver sill.
I hear the velvet hangings swish behind
like whisper of some crimson nightmare's wings.
My feet sink deep in rugs of silken weave
And like a ghost I bend above the bed,
A girl lies there, her sleeping lips a-smile
On soft arm pillowing the golden head.
Her tender limbs stretched out in light repose.
There is no gown to veil her symmetry.
She lies and shimmers ivory in the moon.
Those perfect, scarlet lips were made to kiss;
My arm should be about that slender waist.
But here the serpent rustles grisly scales.
And sways beside me like a fearful tree.
His whispers speak of deeper, fiercer lusts,
Of wilder joys, most terrible and strange.
That change soft dreams to nightmares red and grim.
He indicates the curves of that soft breast;
He whispers of the red wine which is blood.
He makes me feel the thrill that's born of death.
This is not earthly—from what darkened world,
What shadowed planet, what inhuman sphere
Come such wild dreams, such fearsome fantasies?
The serpent bids me stoop to that soft breast
To let the dagger kiss—with one swift thrust—
Death should be beautiful, then crouching by
Watch with quick breath and glinting eye the blood
Drain slowly from that soft, rose-tinted cheek
Until the wine has oozed from every vein
Leaving her marble white and marble cold
Like some inhuman goddess from a star.
Drained clean of all the grosser things of life.
Then raise her gently from the ruby lake
And kiss her cheeks as one who knows true sin.
Serpent
Table of Contents
I am the symbol of Creation and Destruction
I am the beginning and the end.
With my tail in my mouth
I am the Circle of Eternity.
Wisdom is in my eyes
And the dusk of wisdom lurks amid my coils.
My track circles the world
And I loop my coils around the Universe.
My head waves among the stars
And the nations fall prostrate before me.
Coiled, head upright, I am the spirit of the sea.
The world-shaking dinosaur was my henchman
And the flying dragons were my footmen.
The ancients knew me.
They reared shrines and altars
And I taught them dim, dusky wisdom.
I coiled in the ruins of Troy and Babylon
And on the forgotten streets of Nineveh.
The Norse called me Midgaard and built their galleys
Like a sea-serpent.
The Egyptians and the Indians called me Ysis
And the Phoenecians Baal.
I am the sea that girdles the world.
I am the first and I shall be the last.
I am the Serpent of the Ages.
Shadow of Dreams
Table of Contents
Stay not from me that veil of dreams that gives
Strange seas and and skies and lands and curious fire,
Black dragons, crimson moons and white desire,
That through the silvery fabric sifts and sieves
Strange shadows, shades and all unmeasured things,
And in the sifting lends them shapes and wings
And makes them known in ways past common knowing--
Red lands, black seas and ivory rivers flowing.
How of the gold we gather in our hands?
It cheers, but shall escape us at the last,
And shall mean less, when this brief day is past,
Than that we gathered on the yellow sands,
The phantom ore we found in Wizard-lands.
Keep not from me my veil of curious dreams
Through which I see the giant things which drink
From mountain-castled rivers--on the brink
Black elephants that woo the fronded streams,
And golden tom-toms pulsing through the dusk,
And yellow stars, black trees and red-eyed cats,
And bales of silk and amber jars of musk,
And opal shrines and tents and vampire bats.
Long highways climbing eastward to the moon,
And caravans of camels lade with spice,
And ancient sword hilts carved with scroll and rune,
And marble queens with eyes of crimson ice.
Uncharted shores where moons of scarlet spray
Break on a Viking's galley on the sand,
And curtains held by one slim silver band
That float from casements opening on a bay,
And monstrous iron castles, dragon-barred,
And purple cloaks with inlaid gems bestarred.
Long silver tasseled mantles, curious furs,
And camel bells and dawns and golden heat,
And tuneful rattle of the horseman's spurs
Along some sleeping desert city's street.
Time strides and all too soon shall I grow old
With still all earth to see, all life to live:
Then come to me, my silver veil, and sieve,
Seas of illusion beached with magic gold.
Shadows
Table of Contents
A black moon nailed against a sullen dawn
Shakes down dark petals of a sombre rose;
The long lank shadows, sons of solitude,
Slink to the hills that silent, crouch and brood.
Across the East a grisly radiance grows,
And in the West the last grim star is gone.
Sons of the glaring idols of the night,
There still are groves amid the ebon crags,
In silent valleys, far from human sight,
Where horror slinks and doom, and sunlight lags.
There still are caves which know no mortal foot
And crawling rivers, blind and ghastly still,
And rocks that grip the oak tree’s twining root—
The asphodel still blooms beneath the hill.
I know your faces leering through the dark,
Your mumbling lips that fail of human speech.
The winds of night enfold you, swift and stark,
Unhallowed phantoms, whispering each to each.
You thrill with horror subtle, nameless, blind—
But grimmer shadows haunt the human mind.
From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith, June 23, 1926:
I am that which was, was never,
Is, is not, shall be and shall not be.
I am unsubstantial existence, vague Being.
I am Unreality, a dreamy fog floating in this abyss
Of Self Beyond Self.
I live but I do not exist.
I have being but I have no form.
Men desire me but they now not what I am
Or from whence I come.
I come from nowhere and I am because I came not
And go not.
I am the essence of Nothing, the heights of
Attainment, the shade of a dim cloud that has no
Existence. I am built out of the fabric of
Unreality and Nonexistence and I am as powerful
As Babel, as unstable as a sea-fog.
Men are my slaves.
Only a free man can be my slave.
If a man be not free, he is no slave;
And being my slave, then only is he free.
Sighs in the Yellow Leaves
Table of Contents
I took an ivory grinning joss,
From a chest of scented sandal wood.
Now where the woven bamboos cross
It stands where a silver idol stood.
We sat beneath the drowsy fronded tree,
From shell-thin cups we sipped our amber tea.
The Mandarin laid his coral button cap
Upon the silken ocean of his lap.
He raised a finger nail with jade ornate
And carved the sky in patterns intricate.
“And so Confucius taught,” it seemed he sighed.
“The man of virtue shuns the paths of pride.
“That joss you boast is evil’s blood relation,
“Begot of demon born abomination.”
The good man sighed and wept and guzzled tea.
I filled his cup with smooth complacency,
Smiled at his measured jests and stroked his cat,
And watched the silk worms fall upon the mat.
And all the time, fanned by the sleepy wind,
The joss looked down and grinned and grinned and grinned.
The Singer in the Mist
Table of Contents
At birth a witch laid on me monstrous spells,
And I have trod strange highroads all my days,
Turning my feet to gray, unholy ways.
I grope for stems of broken asphodels;
HIgh on the rims of bare, fiend-haunted fells,
I follow cloven tracks that lie ablaze;
And ghosts have led me through the moonlight's haze
To talk with demons in the granite hells.
Seas crash upon dragon-guarded shores,
Bursting in crimson moons of burning spray,
And iron castles ope to me their doors,
And serpent-women lure with harp and lay.
The misty waves shake now to phantom oars—
Seek not for me; I sail to meet the day.
The Skull in the Clouds
Table of Contents
The Black Prince scowled above his lance, and wrath in his hot eyes lay,
"I would rather you rode with the spears of France and not at my side today.
"A man may parry an open blow, but I know not where to fend;
"I would that you were an open foe, instead of a sworn friend.
"You came to me in an hour of need, and your heart I thought I saw;
"But you are one of a rebel breed that knows not king or law.
"You -- with your ever smiling face and a black heart under your mail—
"With the haughty strain of the Norman race and the wild, black blood of the Gael.
"Thrice in a night fight's close-locked gloom my shield by merest chance
"Has turned a sword that thrust like doom—I wot 'twas not of France!
"And in a dust-cloud, blind and red, as we charged the Provence line
"An unseen axe struck Fitzjames dead, who gave his life for mine.
"Had I proofs, your head should fall this day or ever I rode to strife.
"Are you but a wolf to rend and slay, with naught to guide your life?
"No gleam of love in a lady's eyes, no honor or faith or fame?"
I raised my faces to the brooding skies and laughed like a roaring flame.
"I followed the sign of the Geraldine from Meath to the western sea
"Till a careless word that I scarcely heard bred hate in the heart of me.
"Then I lent my sword to the Irish chiefs, for half of my blood is Gael,
"And we cut like a sickle through the sheafs as we harried the lines of the Pale.
"But Dermod O'Connor, wild with wine, called me a dog at heel,
"And I cleft his bosom to the spine and fled to the black O'Neil.
"We harried the chieftains of the south; we shattered the Norman bows.
"We wasted the land from Cork to Louth; we trampled our fallen foes.
"But Conn O'Neill put on me a slight before the Gaelic lords,
"And I betrayed him in the night to the red O'Donnell swords.
"I am no thrall to any man, no vassal to any king.
"I owe no vow to any clan, nor faith to any thing.
"Traitor—but not for fear or gold, but the fire in my own dark brain;
"For the coins I loot from the broken hold I throw to the winds again.
"And I am true to myself alone, through pride and the traitor's part.
"I would give my life to shield your throne, or rip from your breast, the heart.
"For a look or a word, scarce thought or heard, I follow a fading fire.
"Past bead and bell and the hangman's cell, like a harp-call of desire.
"I may not see the road I ride for the witch-fire lamps that gleam;
"But phantoms glide at my bridle-side, and I follow a nameless Dream."
The Black Prince shuddered and shook his head, then crossed himself amain:
"Go, in God's name, and never," he said, "ride in my sight again."
The starlight silvered my bridle-rein; the moonlight burned my lance
As I rode back from the wars again through the pleasant hills of France,
As I rode to tell Lord Amory of the dark Fitzgerald line
If the Black Prince dies, it needs must be by another hand than mine.
Skulls and Dust
Table of Contents
The Persian slaughtered the Apis Bull;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
And the brain fermented beneath his skull.
(Egypt's curse is a deathly thing.)
He rode on the desert raider's track;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
No man of his gleaming hosts came back.
And the dust winds drifted sombre and black.
(Egypt's curse is a deathly thing.)
The eons passed on the desert land;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
And a stranger trod the shifting sand.
(Egypt's curse is a deathly thing.)
His idle hand disturbed the dead;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
Till he found Cambysses' skull of dread
Whence the frenzied brain so long had fled,
That once held terrible visions red.
(Egypt's curse is a deathly thing.)
And an asp crawled from the dust inside
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
And the stranger fell and gibbered and died.
(Egypt's curse is a deathly thing.)
Song at Midnight
Table of Contents
I heard an old gibbet that crowned a bare hill
Creaking a song in the midnight chill;
And I shivered to hear that grisly refrain
That moaned in the night through the fog and the rain.
“Oh, where are the men who came to me
“And danced all night on the gallows tree?
“Gallant and peasant, man and maid,
“Many have walked in that long parade.
“My chains are broken and red with rust,
“My wood is sealed with the moldy crust.
“Have men forgotten their debt to me,
“That they come no more to the gallows tree?”
The drear wind moaned for a dark refrain,
And a raven called in the drifting rain:
“Oh, where are the feasts that awaited me
“Long, long ago on the gibbet tree?”
A slow-worm spoke from the gallows foot:
“Death is spoils for a crow to loot.
“The winds and the rain they worked their will,
“The kites and the ravens have had their fill,
“But last of all when the chains broke free,
“The fruit of the gallows came to me.
“Men and their works, so swiftly past,
“Come to a feast for the worms at last.
“Here I have gnawed on this marrow good,
“Where now I gnaw on this crumbling wood.
“For men and their works are a feast for me—
“The bones, and the noose, and the gallows tree.”
A Song of Cheer
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The lords of Greenwich sallied forth
The men, also the maids;
The dames had cut and combed their hair,
The men wore theirs in braids.
They came unto a comrade's room,
They laid on him their hands
Said they, "Oh fiend, oh cringing wretch!
"Behold the traitor stands!"
They punched him thrice upon the nose,
They blacked his gleaming eye;
They nailed his trousers to the wall
And left him there to die.
But people came and cut him down
And gave him other pants.
"And tell us now," the people said
"How this thing came to chance?"
"Alas for me!" the wretch replied,
"My sinful lust for gold!
"My former friends are down on me—
I wrote a book that sold!"
A Song of College
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Now is chapel gathered, now the seats are full,
Now the goodly president upon his hind legs rises
Launching on a discourse for the great god Bull,
Praising wealth and civic pride and other things he prizes.
While the chapel listens, smug and belly full
And the organ chants a ditty to the great god Bull.
Now the goodly resident waving arms in air
Blesses all the godly men who’ve strewn our land with roses.
O’er his shoulder hordes of ghosts nod and smirk and stare
As his words place chaplets fair on their Jewish noses.
And they smirk and they stare, each a chaplet on his skull,
Testifying power of the great god Bull.
Now the faculty arises to bray across the hall,
Each with high and weighty problems to present before their classes;
Was it wine or apple brandy Noah guzzled to his fall?
Shall we advocate striped trousers for the masses?
Each and every student falls silent then to mull
On the glory and the wisdom of the great god Bull.
And now they rise with deference and to their class rooms go
With sawdust, smoke and hokum to cram each empty skull,
And the teachers serve manure into hands sedate and slow
And all of them burn incense to the great god Bull.
Glory to the dollar! The colleges are full
Of students burning incense to the great god Bull.
A Song of Greenwich
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The lords of Greenwich sallied forth
The men, also the maids;
The dames had cut and combed their hair,
The men wore theirs in braids.
They came unto a comrade’s room,
They laid on him their hands
Said they, “Oh fiend, oh cringing wretch!
“Behold the traitor stands!”
They punched him thrice upon the nose,
They blacked his gleaming eye;
They nailed his trousers to the wall
And left him there to die.
But people came and cut him down
And gave him other pants.
“And tell us now,” the people said
“How this thing came to chance?”
“Alas for me!” the wretch replied,
“My sinful lust for gold!
“My former friends are down on me—
I wrote a book that sold!”
The Song of the Bats
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The dusk was on the mountain
And the stars were dim and frail
When the bats came flying, flying
From the river and the vale
To wheel against the twilight
And sing their witchy tale.
"We were kings of old!" they chanted,
"Rulers of a world enchanted;
"Every nation of creation
"Owned our lordship over men.
"Diadems of power crowned us,
"Then rose Solomon to confound us,
"In the form of beasts he bound us,
"So our rule was broken then."
Whirling, wheeling into westward,
Fled they in their phantom flight;
Was it but a wing-beat music
Murmured through the star-gemmed night?
Or the singing of a ghost clan
Whispering of forgotten might?
The Song of the Sage
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Thus spoke Scutto on the mountains in the twilight,
Sage and seer and councilor to lords of Hindustand,
“Life,my bold young bastards, according to my light,
“Is but a bucking galley by a band of monkeys manned.”
A Song Out of Midian
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These will I give you, Astair: an armlet of frozen gold,
Gods cut from the living rock, and carven gems in an amber crock,
And a purple woven Tyrian smock, and wine from a pirate's hold.
Kings shall kneel at your feet, Astair, emperors kiss your hand;
Captive girls for your joy shall dance, slim and straight as a striking lance,
Who tremble and bow at your mildest glance and kneel at your least command.
Galleys shall break the crimson seas seeking delights for you;
With silks and silvery fountain gleams I will weave a world that glows and seems
A shimmering mist of rainbow dreams, scarlet and white and blue.
Or is it glory you wish, Astair, the crash and the battle-flame?
The winds shall break on the warship's sail and Death ride free at my horse's tail,
Till all the tribes of the earth shall wail at the terror of your name.
I will break the thrones of the world, Astair, and fling them at your feet;
Flame and banners and doom shall fly, and my iron chariots rend the sky,
Whirlwind on whirlwind heaping high, death and a deadly sleet.
Why are you sad and still, Astair, counting my words as naught?
From slave to queen I have raised you high, and yet you stare with a weary eye,
And never the laugh has followed the sigh, since you from your land were brought.
Do you long for the lowing herds, Astair? For the desert's dawning white?
For the hawk-eyed tribesman's coarse hard fare, and the brown firm limbs that are hard and bare,
And the eagle's rocks and the lion's lair, and the tents of the Israelite?
I have never chained your limbs, Astair; free as the winds that whirl
Go if you wish. The doors are wide, since less to you is an empire's pride
Than the open lands where the tribesmen ride, wooing the desert girl.
Sonora to Del Rio
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Sonora to Del Rio is a hundred barren miles
Where the sotol weave and shimmer in the sun—
Like a host of swaying serpents straying down the bare defiles
When the silver, scarlet webs of dawn are spun.
There are little 'dobe ranchoes, brooding far along the sky
On the sullen, dreary bosoms of the hills.
Not a wolf to break the quiet, not a single bird to fly;
Where the silence is so utter that it thrills.
Maybe, in the heat of evening, comes a wind from Mexico
Laden with the heat of seven Hells,
And the rattler in the yucca and the buzzard dark and slow
Hear and understand the grisly tales it tells.
Gaunt and stark and bare and mocking rise the everlasting cliffs
Like a row of sullen giants carved of stone,
Till the traveler, mazed with silence, thinks to look at hieroglyphs,
Thinks to see a carven pharaoh on his throne.
And the road goes on forever, o'er the barren hill forever,
And there's little to hint of flowing wine—
But beyond the hills and sotol there's a mellow curving river
And a land of sun and mellow wine.
Summer Morn
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Am-ra stood on a mountain height
At the break of a summer morn;
He watched in wonder the starlight fail
And the eastern scarlet flare and pale
As the flame of day was born.
Am-ra the Ta-an
Out of the land of the morning sun,
Am-ra the Ta-an came.
Outlawed by the priests of the Ta-an,
His people spoke not his name.
Am-ra, the mighty hunter,
Am-ra, son of the spear,
Strong and bold as a lion,
Lithe and swift as a deer.
Into the land of the tiger,
Came Am-ra the fearless, alone,
With his bow of pliant lance-wood,
And his spear with the point of stone.
He saw the deer and the bison,
The wild horse and the bear,
The elephant and the mammoth,
To him the land seemed fair. Face to face met he the tiger,
And gripping his spear’s long haft,
Gazed fearless into the snarling face,
“Good hunting!” cried he, and laughed!
The bison he smote at sunrise,
The deer in the heat of day,
The wild horse fell before him,
The cave-bear did he slay!
A cave sought he? Not Am-ra!
He lived as wild and free,
As the wolf that roams the forest,
His only roof a tree.
When he wished to eat he slaughtered,
But not needlessly he slew,
For he felt a brother to the wild folk,
And this the Wild Folk knew.
The deer they spoke to Am-ra,
Of kin by the tiger slain,
Am-ra met the tiger,
And slew him on the plain!
A youth in the land of the Ta-an,
A slim, young warrior, Gaur,
Had followed Am-ra in the chase,
And fought by his side in war.
He yearned for his friend Am-ra
And he hated the high priest’s face,
Till at last with the spear he smote him,
And fled from the land of his birth race.
Am-ra’s foot-prints he followed,
And he wandered far away,
Till he came to the land of the tiger,
In the gateway of the day.
Into the land of the tiger,
There came an alien race,
Stocky and swart and savage,
Black of body and face.
Into the country of Am-ra,
Wandered the savage band,
No bows they bore but each carried
A stone-tipped spear in his hand.
They paused in Am-ra’s country,
And camped at his clear spring fair,
And they slew the deer and the wild horse,
But fled from the tiger and bear.
Back from a hunt came Am-ra,
With the pelt of a grizzly bear,
He went to the spring of clear water
And he found the black men there.
More like apes than men were they,
They knew not the use of the bow,
They tore their meat and ate it raw
For fire they did not know.
Then angry waxed bold Am-ra,
Furious grew he then,
For he would not share his country
With a band of black ape-men.
Surrender
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I will rise some day when the day is done
And the stars begin to quiver;
I will follow the road of the setting sun
Till I come to a dreaming river.
I am weary now of the world and vow
Of the winds and the winter weather;
I'll reel through a few more years somehow,
Then I'll quite them altogether.
I'll go to a girl that once I knew
And I will not swerve or err,
And I care not if she be false or true
For I am not true to her.
Her eyes are fierce and her skin is brown
And her wild blood hotly races,
But it's little I care if she does not frown
At any man's embraces.
Should I ask for a love none may invade?
Is she more or less than human?
Do I ask for more, who have betrayed
Man, devil, god and woman?
Enough for me if she has of me
A bamboo hut she'll share,
And enough tequilla to set me free
From the ghosts that leer and stare.
I'll lie all day in a sodden sleep
Through days without name or number,
With only the wind in the sky's blue deep
To haunt my unshaken slumber.
And I'll lie by night in the star-roofed hut
Forgetful and quiet hearted,
Till she comes with her burning eyes half shut
And her red lips hot and parted.
The past is flown when the cup is full,
And there is no chain for linking
And any woman is beautiful
When a man is blind with drinking.
Life is a lie that cuts like a knife
With its sorrow and fading blisses;
I'll go to a girl who asks naught of life
Save wine and a drunkard's kisses.
No man shall know my race or name,
Or my past sun-ripe or rotten,
Till I travel the road by which I came,
Forgetting and soon forgotten.
Tarantella
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Heads! Heads! Heads!
Bounce on the cobble stones.
Glitter of scarlets and flame of reds
Crimson the road that Freedom treads,
We’re rearing a fane of bones.
And bare feet
Weave their beat
Down the red reeking street.
Hell holds sway.
Slay! Slay!
Hate goes bellowing through the land,
Crimson-hued is my gleaming brand.
Kill! Kill! And my lips a-thrill
With hot kisses snatched in the frenzied whirl—
Raped from the lips of a noble girl.
And her brother’s blood on my hand.
Rage, lust, passion-hot.
Prance, dance, you sans culotte.
This is your hour, the height of your power,
Culture, decency forgot.
Blood! Blood! The red gleams preen
On yon fair maid the guillotine!
Vive, vive la guillotine!
Hate and slaughter, that is all;
Blood to shed and heads to fall.
Love is lust and good is lies,
Satan rides the eery skies.
Dance and sway
Whirl away
Meet and kiss, it is bliss
But to slay!
All the world’s a gore-rimmed sea, lo, the devil laughs with glee.
Come and dance then, you with me, come and caper wild and free.
With red blood those fires are lit,
Hades’ smoke is tinged with it.
And the very skies that soar
Are encrimsoned as with gore—
Yon was once a baron’s head,
Now it decks a pike instead.
I salute ye, with my sword.
Here’s to you, m’sieu le lord.
Much you had of wondrous wine,
Ermine coats and horses fine,
Luscious lips of dainty girls,
Snowy bosoms, gold and pearls,
None so haughty as your sneer—
Now you ride a common’s spear.
Here’s to you! In hell you burn.
I am on the upward turn
Of the slow revolving Wheel
With my reign of blood and steel.
O’er my prostrate head ye strode;
On my shoulder bent ye rode.
You the whip-man, I the clown
Till I rose to tread you down.
They will rise to trample me—
For the moment I am free.
Through the ribs the winds may drone
Now the world is all mine own.
Mine to lust, to rage, to dance!
Vive la Freedom! Vive la France!
The Tempter
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Something tapped me on the shoulder
Something whispered, "Come with me,
"Leave the world of men behind you,
"Come where care may never find you
"Come and follow, let me bind you
"Where, in that dark, silent sea,
"Tempest of the world ne'er rages;
"There to dream away the ages,
"Heedless of Time's turning pages,
"Only, come with me."
"Who are you?" I asked the phantom,
"I am rest from Hate and Pride.
"I am friend to king and beggar,
"I am Alpha and Omega,
"I was councilor to Hagar
"But men call me suicide."
I was weary of tide breasting,
Weary of the world's behesting,
And I lusted for the resting
As a lover for his bride.
And my soul tugged at its moorings
And it whispered, "Set me free.
"I am weary of this battle,
"Of this world of human cattle,
"All this dreary noise and prattle.
"This you owe to me."
Long I sat and long I pondered,
On the life that I had squandered,
O'er the paths that I had wandered
Never free.
In the shadow panorama
Passed life's struggles and its fray.
And my soul tugged with new vigor,
Huger grew the phantom's figure,
As I slowly tugged the trigger,
Saw the world fade swift away.
Through the fogs old Time came striding,
Radiant clouds were 'bout me riding,
As my soul went gliding, gliding,
From the shadow into day.
That Women May Sing of Us
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I have felt their eyes upon me,
Searing my soul with their burning,
I have known their hard hands on me
Vibrant with deep locked yearning.
Why did their hands grow cold
As they slid along my thighs?
And the fires so fierce and old
Turn to ashes in their eyes?
Thor
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I stand
Back of the North Wind
My hand
Holds the tide’s reins;
My brand
Flashes amid the stars;
I stand
Back of the North Wind.
Tides
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I am weary of birth and battle,
Seasons and Time and tide,
Of the ocean's empty rattle.
And the woman at my side.
I am weary of pain and revel,
And eyes that glitter or weep;
I will sell my soul to the Devil
For a thousand years of sleep.
Then never a dream shall haunt me,
And never a star shall rise,
Nor a shadow come to daunt me
In the blackness over my eyes.
There shall be no name or number
Of the seasons over me;
I shall know the tides of slumber
As a sunken ship, the sea.
And when I shall wake hereafter,
And the Devil comes for his gain,
I will crush him with crimson laughter
And turn to my sleep again.
To a Roman Woman
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Gleaming ivory, black basalt;
Red lips parted and brooding eyes—
Woman of mystery, whose fault
That a black hand spreads your heavy thighs?
Only the carven marble cats
Frozen along the winding frieze,
Only the silent night-winged bats
Know who has lain between your knees.
What were the heights to which you rose?
What were the deeps to which you sank?
What slaves shuddered beneath your blows?
Deep of your charms what masters drank?
Sated deep of your tribe and blood,
Desire again rose up like a wave,
Coursing your veins in a burning flood
At the smooth round limbs of the great black slave.
One more mystery to attain,
One more sensual depth to explore;
Nights of fierce and exalted pain
Racking the soul to its burning core.
White form lapped by the great black arms,
Pleas that are meant to be in vain,
Fingers ravishing secret charms,
Shrill sharp cries of ecstatic pain.
Silver stars in the blue cobalt.
Aura’d lust of a leering god;
Ivory mingling with black basalt,
White legs spread to a stiff black rod.
To a Woman
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Though fathoms deep you sink me in the mould,
Locked in with thick-lapped lead and bolted wood,
Yet rest not easy in your lover's arms;
Let him beware to stand where I have stood.
I shall not fail to burst my ebon case,
And thrust aside the clods with fingers red:
Your blood shall turn to ice to see my face
Look from the shadows on your midnight bed.
To face the dead, he, too, shall wake in vain,
My fingers at his throat, your scream his knell;
He will not see me tear you from your bed,
And drag you by your golden hair to Hell.
To Certain Cultured Women
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Open the window; the jungle calls;
(Searching winds in the grasses rank)
Your masters sleep in the silent halls.
(Breathe the wind, grown haunting and dank.)
Restless woman with magic eyes,
Jungle love is your heritage;
Deep in your soul it slumbers and lies,
Waking after an ageless age.
Men of your hue have drawn apart,
Climbing to heights you never can climb,
The jungle lies in your deep red heart,
Claiming you after a timeless time.
Men of your hue have turned away
From club and arrow and trail and cave—
Deep in your brain you long today
For the fires where the dancers leap and rave.
Open the window; there waits without
One who will sate your primal lust;
One who will grip you and strip and flout,
Humble your pride to the pulsing dust;
Make you a woman primal, debased,
Tame you as you wish to be tamed,
Waking the days when girls were chased
Hard through the reeking woods and shamed.
What do the men of your own race give?
Honor and wealth and tenderness—
What would you have to fully live?
Shame and pain and the whip’s caress!
Wild and ecstatic, burning pain,
Fingers that yield not to your plea—
Loins against which you strive in vain,
Blows and a brutal mastery.
Men may rise to the shining gates,
Out of the ancient bestial sea—
You are still, with your loves and hates,
Primal woman—and ever shall be.
Open the window; your masters sleep;
Wary and cautious; wake them not.
You feel the hot blood raven and leap,
Coursing veins that are passion hot.
Open the window; he waits without;
(Eyes agleam in the gliding gloom)
The jungle raises one gloating shout
As a black man glides in your moonlit room.
Toper
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Toil, cares, annoyances all fade away;
I care not who may run for President.
I drowse and swing my rum the live-long day,
And watch the shallops skimming o'er the bay.
To the Contended
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Bide by the fluted iron walls
Take ye a serving wench to wife;
Drown in the pot the bugle's calls,
Trade your spear for a peddler's knife.
Turn to the vendor's paltry strife,
Gird ye round with doors and bars
Safely snore in the lap of Life—
I must follow the restless stars.
Wait at the doors of your master's halls
—For the faithful server, boards are rife—
Make no oath when the whip-lash falls—
Hark to the counsel of your wife;
Trade your harp for a peddler's fife.
But gods, the spray and the plunging spars!
Here is my heart—in the heart of Life
And I must follow the restless stars
Envoi
King, there are stallions in golden stalls,
But bars of sapphire are only bars!
Bide in peace in the high safe halls—
I must follow the restless stars.
A Tribute to the Sportsmanship of the Fans
Table of Contents
Headlock, hammerlock, toss him on his bean again,
Jump on his belly and boot him in the hips,
Clamp the scissors on his neck
and choke him till he's green again
Get the fans wild-eyed, with froth on their lips.
Barlock, body-slam, nibble on his ears again—
Its just like eating cabbage—and kick him in the groin,
Butt him in the belly, that brings the cheers again,
The fans want a run for their hard-spent coin.
Flying-mare, toe-hold, twist his neck around again,
Wrap his legs around his waist and tie them in a knot,
Stamp in his mouth so his teeth cannot be found again,
The fans paid their money so make it good and hot.
Stranglehold, leg-split, jerk his knee-caps loose again,
Crack his ribs and break his arms, leave him life-long lame,
Send him out on a shutter—then listen to the boos again,
The kind fans howling that the battle was too tame.
Visions
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I cannot believe in a paradise
Glorious, undefiled,
For gates all scrolled and streets of gold
Are tales for a dreaming child.
I am too lost for shame
That it moves me unto mirth,
But I can vision a Hell of flame
For I have lived on earth.
The Voices Waken Memory
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The blind black shadows reach inhuman arms
To draw me into darkness once again;
The brooding night wind hints of nameless harms,
And down the shadowed hill a vague refrain
Bears half-remembered ghosts to haunt my soul,
Like far-off neighing of the nightmare's foal.
But let me fix my phantom-shadowed eyes
Hard on the stars — pale points of silver light—
Here is the borderlad — here reason lies—
There, vision, gryphons, Nothing, and the Night.
Down, down, red spectres, down, and rack me not!
Out, wolves of Hell! Oh God, my pulses thrum;
The night grows fierce and blind and red and hot,
And nearer still a frim insistent drum.
I will not look into the shadows — No!
The star shall grip and hold my frantic gaze—
But even in the stars black visions grow,
And dragons writhe with iron eyes ablaze.
Oh Gods that raised my blindness with your curse,
And let me see the horrid shapes behind
All outward veils that cloak the universe,
The loathsome demon-spells that bind and blind,
Since even the stars are noisome, foul and fell,
Let me glut deep with memory dreams of hell.
The Weakling
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I died in sin and forthwith went to Hell;
I made myself at home upon the coals
Where seas of flame break on the cinder shoals.
Till Satan came and said with angry yell,
"You there—divulge what route by which you fell."
"I spent my youth among the flowing bowls,
"Wasted my life with women of dark souls,
"Died brothel-fighting—drunk on muscatel."
Said he, "My friend, you’ve been directed wrong:
"You’ve naught to recommend you for our feasts—
"Like factory owners, brokers, elders, priests;
"The air for you! This place is for the strong!"
Then as I pondered, minded to rebel,
He laughed and forthwith kicked me out of Hell.
Yodels of Good Sneer to the Pipple, Damn Them
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We are the buttock shakers
And we are the slayers of dreams,
Dredging our lone sea breakers,
Damming up beautiful streams.
Bad losers and friend forsakers
In whom the jackal screams,
But we are the grabbers and takers
Of the world forever it seems
With rotten, bastardly ditties We tore up the world’s great cities. And over the ashes of glory Erected a tenement whorey.
One man with a godamned hammer
Can batter a statue down
And four with an apeish clamor
Can tear off a virgin’s gown.
We, with our sneers and lying,
Since the day when the dawns were young,
Built Gomorrah with our spying
And Sodom we reared and sung.
And we curse all the birds for flying,
And the sod whence the flowers sprung,
As we go selling and buying,
Building a world of dung.
Essays and Articles
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Dula Due To Be Champion
The Beast from the Abyss
The Hyborian Age
Midnight
With a Set of Rattlesnake Rattles
The Ghost of Camp Colorado
Dula Due To Be Champion
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Arthur "Kid" Dula is due to be the middleweight champion of the world, in the opinion of Robert E. Howard of Cross Plains, who witnessed the Dula-Tramel battle in Fort Worth last week.
Howard is a close student of the boxing game, and is thoroughly posted on current boxing as well as on the history of the fight game. Writing to The Bulletin today from his home is Cross Plains, Howard says:
"Last Friday night a boy went through his baptism of blood and fire and emerged victorious. The decision went against him but the moral victory was his.
"Arthur Dula of Brownwood, in his slashing desperate battle against Duke Tramel proved that he was of the stuff of which champions are built. I have seen challengers, champions and near champions perform but that moment in the fourth round, when Dula, his back against the ropes, pinned there by Tramel’s murderous attack, and dazed from a terrific right to the temple—made a desperate rally and outslugged the most dangerous slugger the South has ever produced. Outslugged, outfought and bettered him back across the ring.
"Again in the eighth, when dizzy and bloody the Kid reeled about the ring, out on his feet but with superhuman courage refusing to go down—again in the last desperate round when the Kid, weakened by cruel punishment and low blows charged recklessly across the ring, met Tramel in his own corner. And fighting like an uncaged tiger, smashed the weakening slugger from one side of the ring to the other.
Next Champion
"All this leads to the main point; that which came into my mind as I watched that bloody eighth round. Kid Dula is the next Middleweight Champion of the World.
"The Kid has much to learn of the finer points of boxing; but he is a natural hitter, a clever boxer, tough and courageous. More, he is aggressive to an extent reminiscent of Dempsey. And like all really great sluggers, like Sullivan Ketchel, Terry McGovern, Bob Fitzsimmons and Jack Dempsey, Dula never loses his punch and is most dangerous when apparently out. This quality alone is the greatest gift a fighter can have and one which has sustained Duke Tramel also, through many grim battles and made his for a time, champion of the Southwest. And Dula besides this has other qualities which Trammel lacks, mainly boxing skill and speed. His main handicap is lack of sufficient experience.
"The fight Friday night, boiled down, comes to this: a desperate battle between two iron men, the experience and sledge hammer power of one being offset by the sppedd and aggressiveness of the other. A draw would have been fair to both. One of the greatest fights the South has ever seen.
"And Dula is the next middleweight champion. Al he needs is proper handling. He has everything else."
The Beast from the Abyss
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Having spent most of my life in oil boom towns, I am not unfamiliar with the sight of torn and mangled humanity. Oftener than I like to remember I have seen men suffering, bleeding and dying from machinery accidents, knife stabs, gunshot wounds, and other mishaps. Yet I believe the most sickening spectacle of all was that of a crippled cat limping along a sidewalk, and dragging behind it a broken leg which hung to the stump only by the skin. On that splintered stump the animal was essaying to walk, occasionally emitting a low moaning cry that only slightly resembled the ordinary vocal expressions of a feline.
There is something particularly harrowing about the sight of an animal in pain; the desperate despair, undiluted by hope or reason, that makes it, in a way, a more awful and tragic sight than that of an injured human. In the agony cry of a cat all the blind abysmal anguish of the black cosmic pits seems concentrated. It is a scream from the jungle, the death howl of a Past unspeakably distant, forgotten and denied by humanity, yet which still lies awake at the back of the subconciousness, to be awakened into shuddering memory by a pain-edge yell from a bestial mouth.
Not only in agony and death is the cat a reminder of the brutish Past. In his anger cries and in his love cries, the gliding course through the grass, the hunger that burns shamelessly from his slitted eyes, in all his movements and actions is advertised his kinship with the wild, his tamelessness, and his contempt for man.
Inferior to the dog the cat is, nevertheless, more like human beings than is the former. For he is vain yet servile, greedy yet fastidious, lazy, lustful and selfish. That last characteristic is, indeed, the dominant feline trait. He is monumentally selfish. In his self love he is brazen, candid and unashamed.
Giving nothing in return, he demands everything--he demands it in a raspy, hungry, whining squall that seems to tremble with self-pity, and accuse the world at large of perfidy and broken contract. His eyes are suspicious and avaricious, the eyes of a miser. His manner is at once arrogant and debased. He arches his back and rubs himself against humanity's leg, dirging a doleful plea, while his eyes glare threats and his claws slide convulsively in and out of their padded sheaths.
He is inordinate in his demands, and he gives no thanks for bounty. His only religion is an unfaltering belief in the divine rights of cats. The dog exists only for man, man exists only for cats. The introverted feline conceives himself to be ever the center of the universe. In his narrow skull there is no room for the finer feelings.
Pull a drowning kitten out of the gutter and provide him with a soft cushion to sleep upon, and cream as often as he desires. Shelter, pamper and coddle him all his useless and self-centered life. What will he give you in return? He will allow you to stroke his fur; he will bestow upon you a condescending purr, after the manner of one conferring a great favor. There the evidences of gratitude end. Your house may burn over your head, thugs may break in, rape your wife, knock Uncle Theobald in the head, and string you up by your thumbs to make you reveal the whereabouts of your hoarded wealth. The average dog would die in the defense even of Uncle Theobald. But your fat and pampered feline will look on without interest; he will make no exertions in your behalf, and after the fray, will, likely as not, make a hearty meal off your unprotected corpse.
I have heard of but one cat who ever paid for his salt, and that was through no virtue of his own, but rather the ingenuity of his owner. A good many years ago there was a wanderer who traversed the state of Arkansas in a buggy, accompanied by a large fat cat of nondescript ancestry. This wayfarer toiled not, neither did he spin, and he was a lank, harried-looking individual who wore the aspect of starvation, even when he was full of food.
His method of acquiring meals without work was simple and artistic. Leaving his horse and buggy concealed behind a convenient thicket, he would approach a farmhouse tottering slightly, as if from long fast, carrying the cat under his arm. A knock on the door having summoned the housewife with her stare of suspicion, he would not resort to any such crude and obvious tactics as asking for a hand-out. No; hat in hand, and humbly, he would beg for a pinch of salt.
"Land's sake," would be the almost invariable reply. "What do you want salt for?"
"M'am," the genius would reply tremulously, "I'm so terrible hungry I'm a-goin' to eat this here cat."
Practically in every case the good woman was so shocked that she dragged the feebly protesting wayfarer into the house and filled his belly--and the cat's--with the best of her larder.
I am not a victim of the peculiar cat-phobia which afflicts some people, neither I am one of those whose fondness for the animals is as inexplicable and tyrannical in its way as the above mentioned repulsion. I can take cats or leave them alone.
In my childhood I was ordinarily surrounded by cats. Occasionally they were given to me; more often they simply drifted in and settled. Sometimes they drifted out almost as mysteriously. I am speaking of ordinary cats, country cats, alley cats, cats without pedigree or pride of ancestry. Mongrel animals, like mongrel people, are by far the most interesting as a study.
In my part of the country, high-priced, pure-blooded felines were unknown until a comparatively recent date. Such terms as Persians, Angoras, Maltese, Manx, and the like, meant little or nothing. A cat was a cat, and classified only according to its ability to catch mice. Of late I notice a distinct modification in the blood-stream of the common American alley-cat; thoroughbred strains are mingling with the common soil, producing cats of remarkable hue and shape. Whether it will improve the democratic mongrel population or not, it is a question only time can answer.
For myself, give me an alley cat every time. I remember with what intense feelings of disgust I viewed the first thoroughbred cat I ever saw--a cumbersome ball of grey fur, with the wide blank stare of utter stupidity. A dog came barking wildly across the yard, the pampered aristocrat goggled dumbly, then lumbered across the porch and attempted to climb a post. An alley cat would of shot up the shaft like a streak of grey lightning, to turn at a vantage point and and spit down evil vituperation on its enemy's head. This blundering inbred monster tumbled ignominiously from the column and sprawled--*on its back*--in front of the dog, who was so astounded by the phenomenon that it evidently concluded that its prey was not a cat after all, and hastily took itself off. It was not the first time that a battle was won by awkward stupidity.
I once lived on a farm infested by rats beyond description. They broke up setting hens, devoured eggs and small chickens, and gnawed holes in the floor of the house. The building was old, the floors rotten. The rats played havoc with them. I nailed strips of tin over the holes they gnawed, and in the night I could hear their teeth grating on tin, and their squeals of rage. Traps proved ineffectual. Rats are wise, not so easily snared as mice. The natural alternative was cats--eleven of them, to be exact. Thereafter the old farm was a battleground. The big grey wharf rats, as we called them, are no mean foes for a cat. More than once I have seen them defeat a full-grown feline in pitched battle. The ferocity of the cornered rat is proverbial, and unlike many such proverbs, borne out by actuality. On several occasions, my cousin and I hastened to the aid of our feline allies with bricks and baseball bats.
The most valiant of all the crew was a grey cat of medium size called, through some obscure process, Fessler. Despite the fact that he was at once ignominiously routed by a giant rat in a Homeric battle that should have formed the base for a whole cycle of rodent hero-sagas, he was a cat among cats. In fact, fantastic as it may seem, I sometimes seemed to detect a fleeting shadow of an emotion that was almost affection.
He had poise and dignity; most cats have these qualities. He had courage--for which, despite legends to the contrary, the feline race in general is not noted. He was a mouser of note. He was intelligent--the most intelligent cat I have ever known. In the end, when all the cats but one died of one of those unexplainable plagues that strikes communities of felines, he dragged himself back to the house to die. Stricken, he had retired to the barn, and there he fought out his losing battle alone; but with death on him, he tottered from his retreat, staggered painfully through the night, and sank down beneath my window, where his body was found the next morning. It was as if, in his last extremity, he sought the human aid that mere instinct could not have prompted him to seek.
Most of the other cats died in solitary refuges of their own. One, a black kitten, recovered, but was so thin and weak it could not stand. My cousin shot a rabbit, cut it up, and fed the cat the raw meat. Unable to stand, it crouched above the warm flesh, ate enough to have burst a well cat, then, turning on its side, smiled as plainly as any human ever smiles, and sank into death like one falling asleep. It has been my misfortune to see many animals die, but I never saw a more peaceful, contented death than that. My cousin and I interred it beside its brothers and sisters who perished in the plague, firing over it a military salute. May my own death be as easy as that cat's!
I said one cat lived. For all I know, she may be living yet, populating the mesquite-grown hills with her progeny. For she was a veritable phoenix of a cat, defying death, and rising from the ruins of catdom unharmed, and generally with a fresh litter of squalling young.
She was large of body, variegated of color--a somewhat confused mixture of white, yellow and black. Her face was dusky, so she was named Blackface. She had a sister, a smaller cat, who seemed borne down by the woes of the world. Her face was the comically tragic mask of a weary clown. She died in the Big Plague.
But Blackface did not die. Just before the cats began to fall, she vanished, and I supposed that she had been stricken and dragged herself away to die in the bushes. But I was mistaken. After the last of her companions had been gathered to their ancestors, after the polluted gathering places had been cleaned by time and the elements, Blackface came home. With her came a brood of long-legged kittens. She remained at the farm until the youngsters were ready to wean, then once more she disappeared. When she returned, a few weeks later, she returned alone.
I had begun to accumulate cats again, and as long as I lived on the farm, I enjoyed periods of cat-inflation, separated by times when the mysterious plague returned and wiped them out. But the Plague never got Blackface. Each time, just before the slaughter began, she vanished mysteriously, nor did she return until the last cat had died, and the danger of contamination had passed. That happened too many times to be dismissed as coincidence. Somehow, the she-cat knew, and avoided the doom that struck down her companions.
She was taciturn, cryptic, laden with mysterious wisdom older than Egypt. She did not raise her kittens about her. I think that she had learned that there was danger in populated centers. Always, when they were able to defend for themselves, she led them into the woods and lost them. And however impossible it may be for a human being to "lose" a cat, none of them ever came back from the farm from which Blackface led them. But the countryside began to be infested with "wild" cats. Her sons and daughters dwelt in the mesquite flats, in the chaparral, and among the cactus beds. Some few of them took up farmhouses and became mousers of fame; most of them remained untamed, hunters and slayers, devourers of birds and rodents and young rabbits, and, I suspect, of chickens.
Blackface was cloaked in mystery. She came in the night, and in the night she went. She bore her kittens in the deep woods, brought them back to civilization for a space that they might be sheltered while in their helpless infancy--and that her own work might be less arduous--and back to the woods she took them when the time was ripe.
As the years passed, her returns to civilization became less and less frequent. At last she did not even bring her brood, but supported them in the wilderness. The primitive called her, and the call was stronger than the urge to slothful ease. She was silent, primordial, drawn to the wild. She came no more to the dwellings of man, but I had glimpses of her at dawn or twilight, flashing like a streak of black-barred gold through the tall grass, or gliding phantom-like through the mesquites. The fire in her elemental eyes was undimmed, the muscles rippling under her fur unsoftened by age. That was nearly twenty years ago. It would not surprise me to learn that she still lives among the cactus-grown valleys and the mesquite-clad hills. Some things are too elemental to die.
Just now I am uncertain as to the number of cats I possess. I could not prove my ownership of a single cat, but several have come and taken up their abode in the feed shed and beside the back step, allowed me to feed them, and at times bestowed upon me the favor of a purr. So long as no one claims them, I suppose I can look on them as my property.
I am uncertain as to their numbers, because there has been an addition to the community, and I do not know how many. I hear them squalling among the hay bales, but I have not had an opportunity to count them. I know only that they are the offspring of a stocky, lazy gray cat, whose democratic mongrel blood is diluted with some sort of thoroughbred stock.
At one time there were five. One was a black and white cat whose visits were furtive and soon ceased. One was a grey and white female, undersized, as so many good mousers are, and like a good killer, possessed of a peculiarly thin whining voice. Because of her preference to the sheds and feed stalls, she bore the casual name of Barn-cat. Another was a magnificent image of primitive savagery--a giant yellow cat, plainly half-breed, mongrel mixed with some stock that might have been Persian. So he was referred to as "the Persian."
I have found that the average yellow cat is deficient in courage. The Persian was an exception. He was the biggest, most powerful, mixed-breed I ever saw, and the fiercest. He was always ravenous, and his powerful jaws crushed chicken bones in a startling manner. He ate, indeed, more like a dog than a cat. He was not indolent or fastidious. He was a lusty soldier of fortune, without morals or scruples, but possessed of an enviable vitality.
He was enamored of Barn-cat, and no woman could have acted the coquette with greater perfection. She treated him like a dog. He wooed her in his most ingratiating manner, to be rewarded by spitting abuse and scratches. A lion in dealing with members of his own sex, he was a lamb with Barn-cat.
Let him approach her in the most respectable manner, and she was transformed into a spitting, clawing fury. Then when he retired discouraged, she invariably followed him, picking at him, teasing him, and giving him no peace of mind. Yet if he took hope and attempted any advances on the ground of her actions, she instantly assumed the part of an insulted virgin and greeted him with bared teeth and claws.
Her treatment of him was in strong contrast with her attitude toward Hoot, a big black and white spotted cat whose coloring made him look as if he were wearing the nose guard of a football helmet. Hoot was too lazy to woo Barn-cat, and she tolerated him, or rather ignored him entirely. He could push her off his chosen napping-spot, step on her ear on his way to the feed pan, or even appropriate choice morsels from her personal meal, and she showed no resentment, whereas if the Persian attempted any of these things, she was ready to rend him. On the other hand, her contempt for Hoot was apparent, and she never accorded him either the teasing or the resentment she accorded the Persian.
Their romance was not so very different from some human romances, and like all romances, came to its end. The Persian was a fighter. So much of his time was spent recovering from wounds, that he was always gaunt, and there were always several partly healed scars on his head and body. Finally he limped in with fresh wounds and a broken leg. He lay around for a short time, refusing assistance, and then disappeared. I think that, following his instincts, he dragged himself away somewhere to die.
Barn-cat's career was short. Soon after her lover met his end, she appeared one morning with her tail almost chewed off close to her body. Doubtless she had internal wounds. She was the only one of the crew worth her salt as a mouser, and while she normally avoided big grey rats, I believe they were at last responsible for her doom. And any rate, she too vanished with her wounds and did not return.
The grey cat and her kittens remain, with Hoot, who still sleeps in the sun, too lazy even to keep himself clean. He is the only cat I ever saw which allowed its fur to remain dusty. After a sandstorm he is a disreputable sight for days. Perhaps he catches mice at night, but he shows no enthusiasm for anything but loafing during the day.
The life of a cat is not numbered by nine. Usually it is short, violent and tragic. He suffers, and makes others suffer if he can. He is primitive, bestially selfish. He is, in short, a creature of awful and terrible potentialities, a crystalization of primordial self-love, a materialization of the blackness and squalor of the abyss. He is a green-eyed, steel-thewed, fur-clad block of darkness hewed from the Pits which know not light, nor sympathy, nor dreams, nor hope, nor beauty, nor anything except hunger and the satiating of hunger. But he has dwelt with man since the beginning, and when the last man lies down and dies, a cat will watch his throes, and likelier than not, will gorge its abysmal hunger on his cooling flesh.
The Hyborian Age
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(Nothing in this article is to be considered as an attempt to advance any theory in opposition to accepted history. It is simply a fictional background for a series of fiction-stories. When I began writing the Conan stories a few years ago, I prepared this 'history' of his age and the peoples of that age, in order to lend him and his sagas a greater aspect of realness. And I found that by adhering to the 'facts' and spirit of that history, in writing the stories, it was easier to visualize (and therefore to present) him as a real flesh-and-blood character rather than a ready-made product. In writing about him and his adventures in the various kingdoms of his Age, I have never violated the 'facts' or spirit of the 'history' here set down, but have followed the lines of that history as closely as the writer of actual historical-fiction follows the lines of actual history. I have used this 'history' as a guide in all the stories in this series that I have written.)
Of that epoch known by the Nemedian chroniclers as the Pre-Cataclysmic Age, little is known except the latter part, and that is veiled in the mists of legendry. Known history begins with the waning of the Pre-Cataclysmic civilization, dominated by the kingdoms of Kamelia, Valusia, Verulia, Grondar, Thule and Commoria. These peoples spoke a similar language, arguing a common origin. There were other kingdoms, equally civilized, but inhabited by different, and apparently older races.
The barbarians of that age were the Picts, who lived on islands far out on the western ocean; the Atlanteans, who dwelt on a small continent between the Pictish Islands and the main, or Thurian Continent; and the Lemurians, who inhabited a chain of large islands in the eastern hemisphere.
There were vast regions of unexplored land. The civilized kingdoms, though enormous in extent, occupied a comparatively small portion of the whole planet. Valusia was the western-most kingdom of the Thurian Continent; Grondar the eastern-most. East of Grondar, whose people were less highly cultured than those of their kindred kingdoms, stretched a wild and barren expanse of deserts. Among the less arid stretches of desert, in the jungles, and among the mountains, lived scattered clans and tribes of primitive savages. Far to the south there was a mysterious civilization, unconnected with the Thurian culture, and apparently pre-human in its nature. On the far-eastern shores of the Continent there lived another race, human, but mysterious and non-Thurian, with which the Lemurians from time to time came in contact. They apparently came from a shadowy and nameless continent lying somewhere east of the Lemurian Islands.
The Thurian civilization was crumbling; their armies were composed largely of barbarian mercenaries. Picts, Atlanteans and Lemurians were their generals, their statesmen, often their kings. Of the bickerings of the kingdoms, and the wars between Valusia and Commoria, as well as the conquests by which the Atlanteans founded a kingdom on the mainland, there were more legends than accurate history.
Then the Cataclysm rocked the world. Atlantis and Lemuria sank, and the Pictish Islands were heaved up to form the mountain peaks of a new continent. Sections of the Thurian Continent vanished under the waves, or sinking, formed great inland lakes and seas. Volcanoes broke forth and terrific earthquakes shook down the shining cities of the empires. Whole nations were blotted out.
The barbarians fared a little better than the civilized races. The inhabitants of the Pictish Islands were destroyed, but a great colony of them, settled among the mountains of Valusia's southern frontier, to serve as a buffer against foreign invasion, was untouched. The Continental kingdom of the Atlanteans likewise escaped the common ruin, and to it came thousands of their tribesmen in ships from the sinking land. Many Lemurians escaped to the eastern coast of the Thurian Continent, which was comparatively untouched. There they were enslaved by the ancient race which already dwelt there, and their history, for thousands of years, is a history of brutal servitude.
In the western part of the Continent, changing conditions created strange forms of plant and animal life. Thick jungles covered the plains, great rivers cut their roads to the sea, wild mountains were heaved up, and lakes covered the ruins of old cities in fertile valleys. To the Continental kingdom of the Atlanteans, from sunken areas, swarmed myriads of beasts and savages — ape-men and apes. Forced to battle continually for their lives, they yet managed to retain vestiges of their former state of highly advanced barbarism. Robbed of metals and ores, they became workers in stone like their distant ancestors, and had attained a real artistic level, when their struggling culture came into contact with the powerful Pictish nation. The Picts had also reverted to flint, but had advanced more rapidly in the matter of population and war-science. They had none of the Atlanteans' artistic nature; they were a ruder, more practical, more prolific race. They left no pictures painted or carved on ivory, as did their enemies, but they left remarkably efficient flint weapons in plenty.
These stone-age kingdoms clashed, and in a series of bloody wars, the outnumbered Atlanteans were hurled back into a state of savagery, and the evolution of the Picts was halted. Five hundred years after the Cataclysm the barbaric kingdoms have vanished. It is now a nation of savages — the Picts — carrying on continual warfare with tribes of savages — the Atlanteans. The Picts had the advantage of numbers and unity, whereas the Atlanteans had fallen into loosely knit clans. That was the west of that day.
In the distant east, cut off from the rest of the world by the heaving up of gigantic mountains and the forming of a chain of vast lakes, the Lemurians are toiling as slaves of their ancient masters. The far south is still veiled in mystery. Untouched by the Cataclysm, its destiny is still pre-human. Of the civilized races of the Thurian Continent, a remnant of one of the non-Valusian nations dwells among the low mountains of the southeast — the Zhemri. Here and there about the world are scattered clans of apish savages, entirely ignorant of the rise and fall of the great civilizations. But in the far north another people are slowly coming into existence.
At the time of the Cataclysm, a band of savages, whose development was not much above that of the Neanderthal, fled to the north to escape destruction. They found the snow-countries inhabited only by a species of ferocious snow-apes — huge shaggy white animals, apparently native to that climate. These they fought and drove beyond the Arctic circle, to perish, as the savages thought. The latter, then, adapted themselves to their hardy new environment and throve.
After the Pictish-Atlantean wars had destroyed the beginnings of what might have been a new culture, another, lesser cataclysm further altered the appearance of the original continent, left a great inland sea where the chain of lakes had been, to further separate west from east, and the attendant earthquakes, floods and volcanoes completed the ruin of the barbarians which their tribal wars had begun.
A thousand years after the lesser cataclysm, the western world is seen to be a wild country of jungles and lakes and torrential rivers. Among the forest-covered hills of the northwest exist wandering bands of ape-men, without human speech, or the knowledge of fire or the use of implements. They are the descendants of the Atlanteans, sunk back into the squalling chaos of jungle-bestiality from which ages ago their ancestors so laboriously crawled. To the southwest dwell scattered clans of degraded, cave-dwelling savages, whose speech is of the most primitive form, yet who still retain the name of Picts, which has come to mean merely a term designating men — themselves, to distinguish them from the true beasts with which they contend for life and food. It is their only link with their former stage. Neither the squalid Picts nor the apish Atlanteans have any contact with other tribes or peoples.
Far to the east, the Lemurians, levelled almost to a bestial plane themselves by the brutishness of their slavery, have risen and destroyed their masters. They are savages stalking among the ruins of a strange civilization. The survivors of that civilization, who have escaped the fury of their slaves, have come westward. They fall upon that mysterious pre-human kingdom of the south and overthrow it, substituting their own culture, modified by contact with the older one. The newer kingdom is called Stygia, and remnants of the older nation seemed to have survived, and even been worshipped, after the race as a whole had been destroyed.
Here and there in the world small groups of savages are showing signs of an upward trend; these are scattered and unclassified. But in the north, the tribes are growing. These people are called Hyborians, or Hybori; their god was Bori — some great chief, whom legend made even more ancient as the king who led them into the north, in the days of the great Cataclysm, which the tribes remember only in distorted folklore.
They have spread over the north, and are pushing southward in leisurely treks. So far they have not come in contact with any other races; their wars have been with one another. Fifteen hundred years in the north country have made them a tall, tawny-haired, grey-eyed race, vigorous and warlike, and already exhibiting a well-defined artistry and poetism of nature. They still live mostly by the hunt, but the southern tribes have been raising cattle for some centuries. There is one exception in their so far complete isolation from other races: a wanderer into the far north returned with the news that the supposedly deserted ice wastes were inhabited by an extensive tribe of ape-like men, descended, he swore, from the beasts driven out of the more habitable land by the ancestors of the Hyborians. He urged that a large war-party be sent beyond the arctic circle to exterminate these beasts, whom he swore were evolving into true men. He was jeered at; a small band of adventurous young warriors followed him into the north, but none returned.
But tribes of the Hyborians were drifting south, and as the population increased this movement became extensive. The following age was an epoch of wandering and conquest. Across the history of the world tribes and drifts of tribes move and shift in an everchanging panorama.
Look at the world five hundred years later. Tribes of tawny-haired Hyborians have moved southward and westward, conquering and destroying many of the small unclassified clans.
Absorbing the blood of conquered races, already the descendants of the older drifts have begun to show modified racial traits, and these mixed races are attacked fiercely by new, purer-blooded drifts, and swept before them, as a broom sweeps debris impartially, to become even more mixed and mingled in the tangled debris of races and tag-ends of races.
As yet the conquerors have not come in contact with the older races. To the southeast the descendants of the Zhemri, given impetus by new blood resulting from admixture with some unclassified tribe, are beginning to seek to revive some faint shadow of their ancient culture. To the west the apish Atlanteans are beginning the long climb upward. They have completed the cycle of existence; they have long forgotten their former existence as men; unaware of any other former state, they are starting the climb unhelped and unhindered by human memories. To the south of them the Picts remain savages, apparently defying the laws of Nature by neither progressing nor retrogressing. Far to the south dreams the ancient mysterious kingdom of Stygia. On its eastern borders wander clans of nomadic savages, already known as the Sons of Shem.
Next to the Picts, in the broad valley of Zingg, protected by great mountains, a nameless band of primitives, tentatively classified as akin to the Shemites, has evolved an advanced agricultural system and existence.
Another factor has added to the impetus of Hyborian drift. A tribe of that race has discovered the use of stone in building, and the first Hyborian kingdom has come into being — the rude and barbaric kingdom of Hyperborea, which had its beginning in a crude fortress of boulders heaped to repel tribal attack. The people of this tribe soon abandoned their horse-hide tents for stone houses, crudely but mightily built, and thus protected, they grew strong. There are few more dramatic events in history than the rise of the rude, fierce kingdom of Hyperborea, whose people turned abruptly from their nomadic life to rear dwellings of naked stone, surrounded by cyclopean walls — a race scarcely emerged from the polished stone age, who had by a freak of chance, learned the first rude principles of architecture.
The rise of this kingdom drove forth many other tribes, for, defeated in the war, or refusing to become tributary to their castle-dwelling kinsmen, many clans set forth on long treks that took them half-way around the world. And already the more northern tribes are beginning to be harried by gigantic blond savages, not much more advanced than ape-men.
The tale of the next thousand years is the tale of the rise of the Hyborians, whose warlike tribes dominate the western world. Rude kingdoms are taking shape. The tawny-haired invaders have encountered the Picts, driving them into the barren lands of the west. To the northwest, the descendants of the Atlanteans, climbing unaided from apedom into primitive savagery, have not yet met the conquerors. Far to the east the Lemurians are evolving a strange semi-civilization of their own. To the south the Hyborians have founded the kingdom of Koth, on the borders of those pastoral countries known as the Lands of Shem, and the savages of those lands, partly through contact with the Hyborians, partly through contact with the Stygians who have ravaged them for centuries, are emerging from barbarism. The blond savages of the far north have grown in power and numbers so that the northern Hyborian tribes move southward, driving their kindred clans before them. The ancient kingdom of Hyperborea is overthrown by one of these northern tribes, which, however, retains the old name. Southeast of Hyperborea a kingdom of the Zhemri has come into being, under the name of Zamora. To the southwest, a tribe of Picts have invaded the fertile valley of Zingg, conquered the agricultural people there, and settled among them. This mixed race was in turn conquered later by a roving tribe of Hybori, and from these mingled elements came the kingdom of Zingara.
Five hundred years later the kingdoms of the world are clearly defined. The kingdoms of the Hyborians — Aquilonia, Nemedia, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Koth, Ophir, Argos, Corinthia, and one known as the Border Kingdom — dominate the western world. Zamora lies to the east, and Zingara to the southwest of these kingdoms — people alike in darkness of complexion and exotic habits, but otherwise unrelated. Far to the south sleeps Stygia, untouched by foreign invasion, but the peoples of Shem have exchanged the Stygian yoke for the less galling one of Koth.
The dusky masters have been driven south of the great river Styx, Nilus, or Nile, which, flowing north from the shadowy hinterlands, turns almost at right angles and flows almost due west through the pastoral meadowlands of Shem, to empty into the great sea. North of Aquilonia, the western-most Hyborian kingdom, are the Cimmerians, ferocious savages, untamed by the invaders, but advancing rapidly because of contact with them; they are the descendants of the Atlanteans, now progressing more steadily than their old enemies the Picts, who dwell in the wilderness west of Aquilonia.
Another five centuries and the Hybori peoples are the possessors of a civilization so virile that contact with it virtually snatched out of the wallow of savagery such tribes as it touched. The most powerful kingdom is Aquilonia, but others vie with it in strength and mixed race; the nearest to the ancient root-stock are the Gundermen of Gunderland, a northern province of Aquilonia. But this mixing has not weakened the race. They are supreme in the western world, though the barbarians of the wastelands are growing in strength.
In the north, golden-haired, blue-eyed barbarians, descendants of the blond arctic savages, have driven the remaining Hyborian tribes out of the snow countries, except the ancient kingdom of Hyperborea, which resists their onslaught. Their country is called Nordheim, and they are divided into the red-haired Vanir of Vanaheim, and the yellow-haired Æsir of Asgard.
Now the Lemurians enter history again as Hyrkanians. Through the centuries they have pushed steadily westward, and now a tribe skirts the southern end of the great inland sea — Vilayet — and establishes the kingdom of Turan on the southwestern shore. Between the inland sea and the eastern borders of the native kingdoms lie vast expanses of steppes and in the extreme north and extreme south, deserts. The non-Hyrkanian dwellers of these territories are scattered and pastoral, unclassified in the north, Shemitish in the south, aboriginal, with a thin strain of Hyborian blood from wandering conquerors. Toward the latter part of the period other Hyrkanian clans push westward, around the northern extremity of the inland sea, and clash with the eastern outposts of the Hyperboreans.
Glance briefly at the peoples of that age. The dominant of Hyborians are no longer uniformly tawny-haired and grey-eyed. They have mixed with other races. There is a strong Shemitish, even a Stygian strain among the peoples of Koth, and to a lesser extent, of Argos, while in the case of the latter, admixture with the Zingarans has been more extensive than with the Shemites. The eastern Brythunians have intermarried with the dark-skinned Zamorians, and the people of southern Aquilonia have mixed with the brown Zingarans until black hair and brown eyes are the dominant type in Poitain, the southern-most province. The ancient kingdom of Hyperborea is more aloof than the others, yet there is alien blood in plenty in its veins, from the capture of foreign women — Hyrkanians, Æsir and Zamorians. Only in the province of Gunderland, where the people keep no slaves, is the pure Hyborian stock found unblemished. But the barbarians have kept their bloodstream pure; the Cimmerians are tall and powerful, with dark hair and blue or grey eyes. The people of Nordheim are of similar build, but with white skins, blue eyes and golden or red hair. The Picts are of the same type as they always were — short, very dark, with black eyes and hair. The Hyrkanians are dark and generally tall and slender, though a squat slant-eyed type is more and more common among them, resulting from mixture with a curious race of intelligent, though stunted, aborigines, conquered by them among the mountains east of Vilayet, on their westward drift. The Shemites are generally of medium height, though sometimes when mixed with Stygian blood, gigantic, broadly and strongly built, with hook noses, dark eyes and blue-black hair. The Stygians are tall and well made, dusky, straight-featured — at least the ruling classes are of that type. The lower classes are a down-trodden, mongrel horde, a mixture of negroid, Stygian, Shemitish, even Hyborian bloods. South of Stygia are the vast black kingdoms of the Amazons, the Kushites, the Atlaians and the hybrid empire of Zembabwei.
Between Aquilonia and the Pictish wilderness lie the Bossonian marches, peopled by descendants of an aboriginal race, conquered by a tribe of Hyborians, early in the first ages of the Hyborian drift. This mixed people never attained the civilization of the purer Hyborians, and was pushed by them to the very fringe of the civilized world. The Bossonians are of medium height and complexion, their eyes brown or grey, and they are mesocephalic. They live mainly by agriculture, in large walled villages, and are part of the Aquilonian kingdom. Their marches extend from the Border kingdom in the north to Zingara in the southwest, forming a bulwark for Aquilonia against both the Cimmerians and the Picts. They are stubborn defensive fighters, and centuries of warfare against northern and western barbarians have caused them to evolve a type of defense almost impregnable against direct attack.
Five hundred years later the Hyborian civilization was swept away. Its fall was unique in that it was not brought about by internal decay, but by the growing power of the barbarian nations and the Hyrkanians. The Hyborian peoples were overthrown while their vigorous culture was in its prime.
Yet it was Aquilonia's greed which brought about that overthrow, though indirectly. Wishing to extend their empire, her kings made war on their neighbors. Zingara, Argos and Ophir were annexed outright, with the western cities of Shem, which had, with their more eastern kindred, recently thrown off the yoke of Koth. Koth itself, with Corinthia and the eastern Shemitish tribes, was forced to pay Aquilonia tribute and lend aid in wars. An ancient feud had existed between Aquilonia and Hyperborea, and the latter now marched to meet the armies of her western rival. The plains of the Border Kingdom were the scene of a great and savage battle, in which the northern hosts were utterly defeated, and retreated into their snowy fastnesses, whither the victorious Aquilonians did not pursue them. Nemedia, which had successfully resisted the western kingdom for centuries, now drew Brythunia and Zamora, and secretly, Koth, into an alliance which bade fair to crush the rising empire. But before their armies could join battle, a new enemy appeared in the east, as the Hyrkanians made their first real thrust at the western world. Reinforced by adventurers from east of Vilayet, the riders of Turan swept over Zamora, devastated eastern Corinthia, and were met on the plains of Brythunia by the Aquilonians who defeated them and hurled them flying eastward. But the back of the alliance was broken, and Nemedia took the defensive in future wars, aided occasionally by Brythunia and Hyperborea, and, secretly, as usual, by Koth. This defeat of the Hyrkanians showed the nations the real power of the western kingdom, whose splendid armies were augmented by mercenaries, many of them recruited among the alien Zingarans, and the barbaric Picts and Shemites. Zamora was reconquered from the Hyrkanians, but the people discovered that they had merely exchanged an eastern master for a western master. Aquilonian soldiers were quartered there, not only to protect the ravaged country, but also to keep the people in subjection. The Hyrkanians were not convinced; three more invasions burst upon the Zamorian borders, and the Lands of Shem, and were hurled back by the Aquilonians, though the Turanian armies grew larger as hordes of steel-clad riders rode out of the east, skirting the southern extremity of the inland sea.
But it was in the west that a power was growing destined to throw down the kings of Aquilonia from their high places. In the north there was incessant bickering along the Cimmerian borders between the black-haired warriors and the Nordheimir; and the AEsir, between wars with the Vanir, assailed Hyperborea and pushed back the frontier, destroying city after city. The Cimmerians also fought the Picts and Bossonians impartially, and several times raided into Aquilonia itself, but their wars were less invasions than mere plundering forays.
But the Picts were growing amazingly in population and power. By a strange twist of fate, it was largely due to the efforts of one man, and he an alien, that they set their feet upon the ways that led to eventual empire. This man was Arus, a Nemedian priest, a natural-born reformer. What turned his mind toward the Picts is not certain, but this much is history — he determined to go into the western wilderness and modify the rude ways of the heathen by the introduction of the gentle worship of Mitra. He was not daunted by the grisly tales of what had happened to traders and explorers before him, and by some whim of fate he came among the people he sought, alone and unarmed, and was not instantly speared.
The Picts had benefited by contact with Hyborian civilization, but they had always fiercely resisted that contact. That is to say, they had learned to work crudely in copper and tin, which were found scantily in their country, and for which latter metal they raided into the mountains of Zingara, or traded hides, whale's teeth, walrus tusks and such few things as savages have to trade. They no longer lived in caves and tree-shelters, but built tents of hides, and crude huts, copied from those of the Bossonians. They still lived mainly by the chase, since their wilds swarmed with game of all sorts, and the rivers and sea with fish, but they had learned how to plant grain, which they did sketchily, preferring to steal it from their neighbors the Bossonians and Zingarans. They dwelt in clans which were generally at feud with each other, and their simple customs were blood-thirsty and utterly inexplicable to a civilized man, such as Arus of Nemedia. They had no direct contact with the Hyborians, since the Bossonians acted as a buffer between them. But Arus maintained that they were capable of progress, and events proved the truth of his assertion — though scarcely in the way he meant.
Arus was fortunate in being thrown in with a chief of more than usual intelligence — Gorm by name. Gorm cannot be explained, any more than Genghis Khan, Othman, Attila, or any of those individuals, who, born in naked lands among untutored barbarians, yet possess the instinct for conquest and empire-building. In a sort of bastard-Bossonian, the priest made the chief understand his purpose, and though extremely puzzled, Gorm gave him permission to remain among his tribe unbutchered — a case unique in the history of the race. Having learned the language Arus set himself to work to eliminate the more unpleasant phases of Pictish life — such as human sacrifice, blood-feud, and the burning alive of captives. He harangued Gorm at length, whom he found to be an interested, if unresponsive listener. Imagination reconstructs the scene — the black-haired chief, in his tiger-skins and necklace of human teeth, squatting on the dirt floor of the wattle hut, listening intently to the eloquence of the priest, who probably sat on a carven, skin-covered block of mahogany provided in his honor — clad in the silken robes of a Nemedian priest, gesturing with his slender white hands as he expounded the eternal rights and justices which were the truths of Mitra. Doubtless he pointed with repugnance at the rows of skulls which adorned the walls of the hut and urged Gorm to forgive his enemies instead of putting their bleached remnants to such use. Arus was the highest product of an innately artistic race, refined by centuries of civilization; Gorm had behind him a heritage of a hundred thousand years of screaming savagery — the pad of the tiger was in his stealthy step, the grip of the gorilla in his black-nailed hands, the fire that burns in a leopard's eyes burned in his.
Arus was a practical man. He appealed to the savage's sense of material gain; he pointed out the power and splendor of the Hyborian kingdoms, as an example of the power of Mitra, whose teachings and works had lifted them up to their high places. And he spoke of cities, and fertile plains, marble walls and iron chariots, jeweled towers, and horsemen in their glittering armor riding to battle. And Gorm, with the unerring instinct of the barbarian, passed over his words regarding gods and their teachings, and fixed on the material powers thus vividly described. There in that mud-floored wattle hut, with the silk-robed priest on the mahogany block, and the dark-skinned chief crouching in his tiger-hides, was laid the foundations of empire.
As has been said, Arus was a practical man. He dwelt among the Picts and found much that an intelligent man could do to aid humanity, even when that humanity was cloaked in tiger-skins and wore necklaces of human teeth. Like all priests of Mitra, he was instructed in many things. He found that there were vast deposits of iron ore in the Pictish hills, and he taught the natives to mine, smelt and work it into implements — agricultural implements, as he fondly believed. He instituted other reforms, but these were the most important things he did: he instilled in Gorm a desire to see the civilized lands of the world; he taught the Picts how to work in iron; and he established contact between them and the civilized world. At the chief's request he conducted him and some of his warriors through the Bossonian marches, where the honest villagers stared in amazement, into the glittering outer world.
Arus no doubt thought that he was making converts right and left, because the Picts listened to him, and refrained from smiting him with their copper axes. But the Pict was little calculated to seriously regard teachings which bade him forgive his enemy and abandon the war-path for the ways of honest drudgery. It has been said that he lacked artistic sense; his whole nature led to war and slaughter. When the priest talked of the glories of the civilized nations, his dark-skinned listeners were intent, not on the ideals of his religion, but on the loot which he unconsciously described in the narration of rich cities and shining lands. When he told how Mitra aided certain kings to overcome their enemies, they paid scant heed to the miracles of Mitra, but they hung on the description of battle-lines, mounted knights, and maneuvers of archers and spearmen. They harkened with keen dark eyes and inscrutable countenances, and they went their ways without comment, and heeded with flattering intentness his instructions as to the working of iron, and kindred arts.
Before his coming they had filched steel weapons and armor from the Bossonians and Zingarans, or had hammered out their own crude arms from copper and bronze. Now a new world opened to them, and the clang of sledges re-echoed throughout the land. And Gorm, by virtue of this new craft, began to assert his dominance over other clans, partly by war, partly by craft and diplomacy, in which latter art he excelled all other barbarians.
Picts now came and went freely into Aquilonia, under safe-conduct, and they returned with more information as to armor-forging and sword-making. More, they entered Aquilonia's mercenary armies, to the unspeakable disgust of the sturdy Bossonians. Aquilonia's kings toyed with the idea of playing the Picts against the Cimmerians, and possibly thus destroying both menaces, but they were too busy with their policies of aggression in the south and east to pay much heed to the vaguely known lands of the west, from which more and more stocky warriors swarmed to take service among the mercenaries.
These warriors, their service completed, went back to their wilderness with good ideas of civilized warfare, and that contempt for civilization which arises from familiarity with it. Drums began to beat in the hills, gathering-fires smoked on the heights, and savage sword-makers hammered their steel on a thousand anvils. By intrigues and forays too numerous and devious to enumerate, Gorm became chief of chiefs, the nearest approach to a king the Picts had had in thousands of years. He had waited long; he was past middle age. But now he moved against the frontiers, not in trade, but in war.
Arus saw his mistake too late; he had not touched the soul of the pagan, in which lurked the hard fierceness of all the ages. His persuasive eloquence had not caused a ripple in the Pictish conscience. Gorm wore a corselet of silvered mail now, instead of the tiger-skin, but underneath he was unchanged — the everlasting barbarian, unmoved by theology or philosophy, his instincts fixed unerringly on rapine and plunder.
The Picts burst on the Bossonian frontiers with fire and sword, not clad in tiger-skins and brandishing copper axes as of yore, but in scale-mail, wielding weapons of keen steel. As for Arus, he was brained by a drunken Pict, while making a last effort to undo the work he had unwittingly done. Gorm was not without gratitude; he caused the skull of the slayer to be set on the top of the priest's cairn. And it is one of the grim ironies of the universe that the stones which covered Arus's body should have been adorned with that last touch of barbarity — above a man to whom violence and blood-vengeance were revolting.
But the newer weapons and mail were not enough to break the lines. For years the superior armaments and sturdy courage of the Bossonians held the invaders at bay, aided, when necessary, by imperial Aquilonian troops. During this time the Hyrkanians came and went, and Zamora was added to the empire.
Then treachery from an unexpected source broke the Bossonian lines. Before chronicling this treachery, it might be well to glance briefly at the Aquilonian empire. Always a rich kingdom, untold wealth had been rolled in by conquest, and sumptuous splendor had taken the place of simple and hardy living. But degeneracy had not yet sapped the kings and the people; though clad in silks and cloth-of-gold, they were still a vital, virile race. But arrogance was supplanting their former simplicity. They treated less powerful people with growing contempt, levying more and more tributes on the conquered. Argos, Zingara, Ophir, Zamora and the Shemite countries were treated as subjugated provinces, which was especially galling to the proud Zingarans, who often revolted, despite savage retaliations.
Koth was practically tributary, being under Aquilonia's "protection" against the Hyrkanians. But Nemedia the western empire had never been able to subdue, although the latter's triumphs were of the defensive sort, and were generally attained with the aid of Hyperborean armies. During this period Aquilonia's only defeats were: her failure to annex Nemedia; the rout of an army sent into Cimmeria; and the almost complete destruction of an army by the Æsir. Just as the Hyrkanians found themselves unable to withstand the heavy cavalry charges of the Aquilonians, so the latter, invading the snow-countries, were overwhelmed by the ferocious hand-to-hand fighting of the Nordics. But Aquilonia's conquests were pushed to the Nilus, where a Stygian army was defeated with great slaughter, and the king of Stygia sent tribute — once at least — to divert invasion of his kingdom. Brythunia was reduced in a series of whirlwind wars, and preparations were made to subjugate the ancient rival at last — Nemedia.
With their glittering hosts greatly increased by mercenaries, the Aquilonians moved against their old-time foe, and it seemed as if the thrust were destined to crush the last shadow of Nemedian independence. But contentions arose between the Aquilonians and their Bossonian auxiliaries.
As the inevitable result of imperial expansion, the Aquilonians had become haughty and intolerant. They derided the ruder, unsophisticated Bossonians, and hard feeling grew between them — the Aquilonians despising the Bossonians and the latter resenting the attitude of their masters — who now boldly called themselves such, and treated the Bossonians like conquered subjects, taxing them exorbitantly, and conscripting them for their wars of territorial expansion — wars the profits of which the Bossonians shared little. Scarcely enough men were left in the marches to guard the frontier, and hearing of Pictish outrages in their homelands, whole Bossonian regiments quit the Nemedian campaign and marched to the western frontier, where they defeated the dark-skinned invaders in a great battle.
This desertion, however, was the direct cause of Aquilonia's defeat by the desperate Nemedians, and brought down on the Bossonians the cruel wrath of the imperialists — intolerant and short-sighted as imperialists invariably are. Aquilonian regiments were secretly brought to the borders of the marches, the Bossonian chiefs were invited to attend a great conclave, and, in the guise of an expedition against the Picts, bands of savage Shemitish soldiers were quartered among the unsuspecting villagers. The unarmed chiefs were massacred, the Shemites turned on their stunned hosts with torch and sword, and the armored imperial hosts were hurled ruthlessly on the unsuspecting people. From north to south the marches were ravaged and the Aquilonian armies marched back from the borders, leaving a ruined and devastated land behind them.
And then the Pictish invasion burst in full power along those borders. It was no mere raid, but the concerted rush of a whole nation, led by chiefs who had served in Aquilonian armies, and planned and directed by Gorm — an old man now, but with the fire of his fierce ambition undimmed. This time there were no strong walled villages in their path, manned by sturdy archers, to hold back the rush until the imperial troops could be brought up. The remnants of the Bossonians were swept out of existence, and the blood-mad barbarians swarmed into Aquilonia, looting and burning, before the legions, warring again with the Nemedians, could be marched into the west. Zingara seized this opportunity to throw off the yoke, which example was followed by Corinthia and the Shemites. Whole regiments of mercenaries and vassals mutinied and marched back to their own countries, looting and burning as they went. The Picts surged irresistibly eastward, and host after host was trampled beneath their feet. Without their Bossonian archers the Aquilonians found themselves unable to cope with the terrible arrow-fire of the barbarians. From all parts of the empire legions were recalled to resist the onrush, while from the wilderness horde after horde swarmed forth, in apparently inexhaustible supply. And in the midst of this chaos, the Cimmerians swept down from their hills, completing the ruin. They looted cities, devastated the country, and retired into the hills with their plunder, but the Picts occupied the land they had over-run. And the Aquilonian empire went down in fire and blood.
Then again the Hyrkanians rode from the blue east. The withdrawal of the imperial legions from Zamora was their incitement. Zamora fell easy prey to their thrusts, and the Hyrkanian king established his capital in the largest city of the country. This invasion was from the ancient Hyrkanian kingdom of Turan, on the shores of the inland sea, but another, more savage Hyrkanian thrust came from the north. Hosts of steel-clad riders galloped around the northern extremity of the inland sea, traversed the icy deserts, entered the steppes, driving the aborigines before them, and launched themselves against the western kingdoms. These newcomers were not at first allies with the Turanians, but skirmished with them as with the Hyborians; new drifts of eastern warriors bickered and fought, until all were united under a great chief, who came riding from the very shores of the eastern ocean. With no Aquilonian armies to oppose them, they were invincible. They swept over and subjugated Brythunia, and devastated southern Hyperborea, and Corinthia. They swept into the Cimmerian hills, driving the black-haired barbarians before them, but among the hills, where cavalry was less effectual, the Cimmerians turned on them, and only a disorderly retreat, at the end of a whole day of bloody fighting, saved the Hyrkanian hosts from complete annihilation.
While these events had been transpiring, the kingdoms of Shem had conquered their ancient master, Koth, and had been defeated in an attempted invasion of Stygia. But scarcely had they completed their degradation of Koth, when they were overrun by the Hyrkanians, and found themselves subjugated by sterner masters than the Hyborians had ever been. Meanwhile the Picts had made themselves complete masters of Aquilonia, practically blotting out the inhabitants. They had broken over the borders of Zingara, and thousands of Zingarans, fleeing the slaughter into Argos, threw themselves on the mercy of the westward-sweeping Hyrkanians, who settled them in Zamora as subjects. Behind them as they fled, Argos was enveloped in the flame and slaughter of Pictish conquest, and the slayers swept into Ophir and clashed with the westward-riding Hyrkanians. The latter, after their conquest of Shem, had overthrown a Stygian army at the Nilus and over-run the country as far south as the black kingdom of Amazon, of whose people they brought back thousands as captives, settling them among the Shemites. Possibly they would have completed their conquests in Stygia, adding it to their widening empire, but for the fierce thrusts of the Picts against their western conquests.
Nemedia, unconquerable by Hyborians, reeled between the riders of the east and the swordsmen of the west, when a tribe of AEsir, wandering down from their snowy lands, came into the kingdom, and were engaged as mercenaries; they proved such able warriors that they not only beat off the Hyrkanians, but halted the eastward advance of the Picts.
The world at that time presents some such picture: a vast Pictish empire, wild, rude and barbaric, stretches from the coasts of Vanaheim in the north to the southern-most shores of Zingara. It stretches east to include all Aquilonia except Gunderland, the northern-most province, which, as a separate kingdom in the hills, survived the fall of the empire, and still maintains its independence. The Pictish empire also includes Argos, Ophir, the western part of Koth, and the western-most lands of Shem. Opposed to this barbaric empire is the empire of the Hyrkanians, of which the northern boundaries are the ravaged lines of Hyperborea, and the southern, the deserts south of the lands of Shem. Zamora, Brythunia, the Border Kingdom, Corinthia, most of Koth, and all the eastern lands of Shem are included in this empire. The borders of Cimmeria are intact; neither Pict nor Hyrkanian has been able to subdue these warlike barbarians. Nemedia, dominated by the Æsir mercenaries, resists all invasions. In the north Nordheim, Cimmeria and Nemedia separate the conquering races, but in the south, Koth has become a battle-ground where Picts and Hyrkanians war incessantly. Sometimes the eastern warriors expel the barbarians from the kingdom entirely; again the plains and cities are in the hands of the western invaders. In the far south, Stygia, shaken by the Hyrkanian invasion, is being encroached upon by the great black kingdoms. And in the far north, the Nordic tribes are restless, warring continually with the Cimmerians, and sweeping the Hyperborean frontiers.
Gorm was slain by Hialmar, a chief of the Nemedian Æsir. He was a very old man, nearly a hundred years old. In the seventy-five years which had elapsed since he first heard the tale of empires from the lips of Arus — a long time in the life of a man, but a brief space in the tale of nations — he had welded an empire from straying savage clans, he had overthrown a civilization. He who had been born in a mud-walled, wattle-roofed hut, in his old age sat on golden thrones, and gnawed joints of beef presented to him on golden dishes by naked slave-girls who were the daughters of kings. Conquest and the acquiring of wealth altered not the Pict; out of the ruins of the crushed civilization no new culture arose phoenix-like. The dark hands which shattered the artistic glories of the conquered never tried to copy them. Though he sat among the glittering ruins of shattered palaces and clad his hard body in the silks of vanquished kings, the Pict remained the eternal barbarian, ferocious, elemental, interested only in the naked primal principles of life, unchanging, unerring in his instincts which were all for war and plunder, and in which arts and the cultured progress of humanity had no place. Not so with the Æsir who settled in Nemedia. These soon adopted many of the ways of their civilized allies, modified powerfully, however, by their own intensely virile and alien culture.
For a short age Pict and Hyrkanian snarled at each other over the ruins of the world they had conquered. Then began the glacier ages, and the great Nordic drift. Before the southward moving ice-fields the northern tribes drifted, driving kindred clans before them. The Æsir blotted out the ancient kingdom of Hyperborea, and across its ruins came to grips with the Hyrkanians. Nemedia had already become a Nordic kingdom, ruled by the descendants of the Æsir mercenaries. Driven before the onrushing tides of Nordic invasion, the Cimmerians were on the march, and neither army nor city stood before them. They surged across and completely destroyed the kingdom of Gunderland, and marched across ancient Aquilonia, hewing their irresistible way through the Pictish hosts. They defeated the Nordic-Nemedians and sacked some of their cities, but did not halt. They continued eastward, overthrowing a Hyrkanian army on the borders of Brythunia.
Behind them hordes of Æsir and Vanir swarmed into the lands, and the Pictish empire reeled beneath their strokes. Nemedia was overthrown, and the half-civilized Nordics fled before their wilder kinsmen, leaving the cities of Nemedia ruined and deserted. These fleeing Nordics, who had adopted the name of the older kingdom, and to whom the term Nemedian henceforth refers, came into the ancient land of Koth, expelled both Picts and Hyrkanians, and aided the people of Shem to throw off the Hyrkanian yoke. All over the western world, the Picts and Hyrkanians were staggering before this younger, fiercer people. A band of Æsir drove the eastern riders from Brythunia and settled there themselves, adopting the name for themselves. The Nordics who had conquered Hyperborea assailed their eastern enemies so savagely that the dark-skinned descendants of the Lemurians retreated into the steppes, pushed irresistibly back toward Vilayet.
Meanwhile the Cimmerians, wandering southeastward, destroyed the ancient Hyrkanian kingdom of Turan, and settled on the southwestern shores of the inland sea. The power of the eastern conquerors was broken. Before the attacks of the Nordheimr and the Cimmerians, they destroyed all their cities, butchered such captives as were not fit to make the long march, and then, herding thousands of slaves before them, rode back into the mysterious east, skirting the northern edge of the sea, and vanishing from western history, until they rode out of the east again, thousands of years later, as Huns, Mongols, Tatars and Turks. With them in their retreat went thousands of Zamorians and Zingarans, who were settled together far to the east, formed a mixed race, and emerged ages afterward as gypsies.
Meanwhile, also, a tribe of Vanir adventurers had passed along the Pictish coast southward, ravaged ancient Zingara, and come into Stygia, which, oppressed by a cruel aristocratic ruling class, was staggering under the thrusts of the black kingdoms to the south. The red-haired Vanir led the slaves in a general revolt, overthrew the reigning class, and set themselves up as a caste of conquerors. They subjugated the northern-most black kingdoms, and built a vast southern empire, which they called Egypt. From these red-haired conquerors the earlier Pharaohs boasted descent.
The western world was now dominated by Nordic barbarians. The Picts still held Aquilonia and part of Zingara, and the western coast of the continent. But east to Vilayet, and from the Arctic circle to the lands of Shem, the only inhabitants were roving tribes of Nordheimr, excepting the Cimmerians, settled in the old Turanian kingdom. There were no cities anywhere, except in Stygia and the lands of Shem; the invading tides of Picts, Hyrkanians, Cimmerians and Nordics had levelled them in ruins, and the once dominant Hyborians had vanished from the earth, leaving scarcely a trace of their blood in the veins of their conquerors. Only a few names of lands, tribes and cities remained in the languages of the barbarians, to come down through the centuries connected with distorted legend and fable, until the whole history of the Hyborian age was lost sight of in a cloud of myths and fantasies. Thus in the speech of the gypsies lingered the terms Zingara and Zamora; the Æsir who dominated Nemedia were called Nemedians, and later figured in Irish history, and the Nordics who settled in Brythunia were known as Brythunians, Brythons or Britons.
There was no such thing, at that time, as a consolidated Nordic empire. As always, the tribes had each its own chief or king, and they fought savagely among themselves. What their destiny might have been will not be known, because another terrific convulsion of the earth, carving out the lands as they are known to moderns, hurled all into chaos again. Great strips of the western coast sank; Vanaheim and western Asgard — uninhabited and glacier-haunted wastes for a hundred years — vanished beneath the waves. The ocean flowed around the mountains of western Cimmeria to form the North Sea; these mountains became the islands later known as England, Scotland and Ireland, and the waves rolled over what had been the Pictish wilderness and the Bossonian marches. In the north the Baltic Sea was formed, cutting Asgard into the peninsulas later known as Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and far to the south the Stygian continent was broken away from the rest of the world, on the line of cleavage formed by the river Nilus in its westward trend. Over Argos, western Koth and the western lands of Shem, washed the blue ocean men later called the Mediterranean. But where land sank elsewhere, a vast expanse west of Stygia rose out of the waves, forming the whole western half of the continent of Africa.
The buckling of the land thrust up great mountain ranges in the central part of the northern continent. Whole Nordic tribes were blotted out, and the rest retreated eastward. The territory about the slowly drying inland sea was not affected, and there, on the western shores, the Nordic tribes began a pastoral existence, living in more or less peace with the Cimmerians, and gradually mixing with them. In the west the remnants of the Picts, reduced by the cataclysm once more to the status of stone-age savages, began, with the incredible virility of their race, once more to possess the land, until, at a later age, they were overthrown by the westward drift of the Cimmerians and Nordics. This was so long after the breaking-up of the continent that only meaningless legends told of former empires.
This drift comes within the reach of modern history and need not be repeated. It resulted from a growing population which thronged the steppes west of the inland sea — which still later, much reduced in size, was known as the Caspian — to such an extent that migration became an economic necessity. The tribes moved southward, northward and westward, into those lands now known as India, Asia Minor and central and western Europe.
They came into these countries as Aryans. But there were variations among these primitive Aryans, some of which are still recognized today, others which have long been forgotten. The blond Achaians, Gauls and Britons, for instance, were descendants of pure-blooded Æsir. The Nemedians of Irish legendry were the Nemedian Æsir. The Danes were descendants of pure-blooded Vanir; the Goths — ancestors of the other Scandinavian and Germanic tribes, including the Anglo-Saxons — were descendants of a mixed race whose elements contained Vanir, AEsir and Cimmerian strains. The Gaels, ancestors of the Irish and Highland Scotch, descended from pure-blooded Cimmerian clans. The Cymric tribes of Britain were a mixed Nordic-Cimmerian race which preceded the purely Nordic Britons into the isles, and thus gave rise to a legend of Gaelic priority. The Cimbri who fought Rome were of the same blood, as well as the Gimmerai of the Assyrians and Grecians, and Gomer of the Hebrews. Other clans of the Cimmerians adventured east of the drying inland sea, and a few centuries later mixed with Hyrkanian blood, returned westward as Scythians. The original ancestors of the Gaels gave their name to modern Crimea.
The ancient Sumerians had no connection with the western race. They were a mixed people, of Hyrkanian and Shemitish bloods, who were not taken with the conquerors in their retreat. Many tribes of Shem escaped that captivity, and from pure-blooded Shemites, or Shemites mixed with Hyborian or Nordic blood, were descended the Arabs, Israelites, and other straighter-featured Semites. The Canaanites, or Alpine Semites, traced their descent from Shemitish ancestors nuxed with the Kushites settled among them by their Hyrkanian masters; the Elamites were a typical race of this type. The short, thick-limbed Etruscans, base of the Roman race, were descendants of a people of mixed Stygian, Hyrkanian and Pictish strains, and originally lived in the ancient kingdom of Koth. The Hyrkanians, retreating to the eastern shores of the continent, evolved into the tribes later known as Tatars, Huns, Mongols and Turks.
The origins of other races of the modern world may be similarly traced; in almost every case, older far than they realize, their history stretches back into the mists of the forgotten Hyborian age...
Midnight
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Red leaned his elbows upon the table and cursed. The candle guttered low. The bottle was empty, and a slow fire coiled in our brains--the fire which devours and consumes and destroys but never leaps into full wild flame.
I looked at Red with bleared eyes. He hid his face in his hands. He was thinking of a woman he knew. The cards, greasy with handling and stained with whiskey and candle tallow, lay scattered between us. The desire for gambling was gone, and there was no more whiskey.
"Cheer up, Red," I said. "Listen--I'll tell you: Somewhere in the world the sun is coming up like a red dragon to shine on a gilded pagoda; somewhere the bleak silver stars are gleaming on the white sands where a magic caravan is sleeping out in the ages. Somewhere the night wind is blowing through the grass of a mysterious grave. Somewhere there is a gossamer sailed ship carving a wake of silver foam across the dark blue of the Mediterranean. This isn't all, Red."
"Oh, Christ," he groaned, reaching for the empty bottle, "I wish I had a drink."
With a Set of Rattlesnake Rattles
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Here is the emblem of a lethal form of life for which I have no love, but a definite admiration. The wearer of this emblem is inflexibly individualistic. He mingles not with the herd, nor bows before the thrones of the mighty. Between him and the lords of the earth lies an everlasting feud that shall not be quenched until the last man lies dying and the Conqueror sways in shimmering coils above him.
Lapped in sombre mystery he goes his subtle way, touched by neither pity nor mercy. Realizations of ultimate certitudes are his, when the worm rises and the vulture sinks and the flesh shreds back to the earth that bore it. Other beings may make for Life, but he is consecrated to Death. Promise of ultimate dissolution shimmers in his visible being, and the cold soulless certainty of destruction is in his sibilances. The buzzards mark his path by the pregnant waving of the tall grasses, and the blind worms that gnaw in the dark are glad because of him. The foot of a king can not tread on him with impunity, nor the ignorant hand of innocence bruise him unscathed. The emperor who sits enthroned in gold and purple, with his diadem in the thunder-clouds and his sandals on the groaning backs of the nations, let him dare to walk where the rank grass quivers without a wind, and the lethal scent of decay is heavy in the air. Let him dare--and try if his pomp and glory and his lines of steel and gold will awe the coiling death or check the dart of the wedge-shaped head.
For when he sings in the dark it is the voice of Death crackling between fleshless jaw-bones. He reveres not, nor fears, nor sinks his crest for any scruple. He strikes, and the strongest man is carrion for flapping things and crawling things. He is a Lord of the Dark Places, and wise are they whose feet disturb not his meditations.
The Ghost of Camp Colorado
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The muffled drum’s sad roll has beat
The soldiers’ last tattoo;
No more on life’s parade shall meet
That brave and fallen few.
—The Bivouac of the Dead
On the banks of the Jim Ned River in Coleman County, central West Texas, stands a ghost. It is a substantial ghost, built of square cut stone and sturdy timber, but just the same it is a phantom, rising on the ruins of a forgotten past. It is all that is left of the army post known as Camp Colorado in the pioneer days of Texas. This camp, one of a line of posts built in the 1850’s to protect the settlers from Indian raids, had a career as brief as it was stirring. When Henry Sackett, whose name is well known in frontier annals, came to Camp Colorado in 1870, he found the post long deserted and the adobe buildings already falling into ruins. From these ruins he built a home and it is to his home and to the community school house on the site of the old post, that the term of Camp Colorado is today applied.
Today the house he built in 1870 is as strong as if erected yesterday, a splendid type of pioneer Texas ranch-house. It stands upon the foundations of the old army commissary and many of its doors and much of its flooring came from the old government buildings, the lumber for which was freighted across the plains three-quarters of a century ago. The doors, strong as iron, show plainly, beneath their paint, the scars of bullets and arrows, mute evidence of the days when the Comanches swept down like a red cloud of war and the waves of slaughter washed about the adobe walls where blue-clad iron men held the frontier.
This post was first begun on the Colorado River in 1856, but was shifted to the Jim Ned River, although it retained the original name. Built in 1857, in the stirring times of westward drift and Indian raid, the old post in its heyday sheltered notable men—Major Van Dorn, Captain Theodore O’Hara, whose poem, “The Bivouac of the Dead” has thrilled the hearts of generations, General James B. Hood, General James P. Major, General Kirby Smith, and the famous General Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of General Robert E. Lee. From Camp Colorado went Major Van Dorn, first commander of the post, to Utah, in the days of the Mormon trouble. And from Camp Colorado went General James P. Major with the force under Van Dorn, and Captain Sol Ross, later Governor of Texas, on the expedition which resulted in the death of Peta Nocona, the last great Comanche war chief, and the capture of his white wife, Cynthia Ann Parker, whose life-long captivity among the Indians forms one of the classics of the Southwest.
When the clouds of Civil War loomed in the East and the boys in blue marched away from the post in 1861, their going did not end Camp Colorado’s connection with redskin history. For from the ranch-house and store built on the site of the post, Henry Sackett rode with Captain Maltby’s Frontier Battalion Rangers in 1874, on the path of Big Foot and Jape the Comanche, who were leaving a trail of fire and blood across western Texas. On Dove Creek, in Runnels County, which adjoins Coleman County on the west, the Rangers came up with the marauders and it was Henry Sackett’s rifle which, with that of Captain Maltby, put an end forever to the careers of Big Foot and Jape the Comanche, and brought to a swift conclusion the last Indian raid in central West Texas.
Of the original buildings of the post, only one remains—the guard house, a small stone room with a slanting roof now connected with the ranch-house. It was the only post building made of stone; the others, adobe-built, have long since crumbled away and vanished. Of the barracks, the officers’ quarters, the blacksmith shop, the bakery and the other adjuncts of an army camp, only tumbled heaps of foundation stones remain, in which can be occasionally traced the plan of the building. Some of the old corral still stands, built of heavy stones and strengthened with adobe, but it too is crumbling and falling down.
The old guard house, which, with its single window, now walled up, forms a storeroom on the back of the Sackett house, has a vivid history all its own, apart from the military occupancy of the post. After the camp was deserted by the soldiers, it served as a saloon wherein the civilian settlers of the vicinity quenched their thirst, argued political questions and conceivably converted it into a blockhouse in event of Indian menace. One scene of bloodshed at least, it witnessed, for at its crude bar two men quarreled and just outside its door they shot it out, as was the custom of the frontier, and the loser of that desperate game fell dead there.
Today there remains a deep crevice in one of the walls where two military prisoners, confined there when the building was still serving as a dungeon, made a vain attempt to dig their way to liberty through the thick, solid stone of the wall. Who they were, what their crime was, and what implements they used are forgotten; only the scratches they made remain, mute evidence of their desperation and their failure.
In early days there was another saloon at the post, but of that building no trace today remains. Yet it was in use at least up to the time that Coleman County was created, for it was here that the first sheriff of the county, celebrating the gorgeous occasion of his election, emerged from the saloon, fired his six-shooter into the air and yelled: “Coleman Country, by God, and I’m sheriff of every damn’ foot of her! I got the world by the tail on a downhill pull! Yippee!”
A word in regard to the builder of the house that now represents Camp Colorado might not be amiss. The Honorable Henry Sackett was born in Orsett, Essexshire, England, in 1851 and came to America while a youth. Building the house, largely with his own labor, in 1870, he lived there until his death a few years ago, acting as postmaster under seven Presidents, and as store-keeper for the settlers. The south side of the stone house, built into a single great room, was used as post office and general store. Henry Sackett was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word, an upright and universally respected gentleman, a member of the Frontier Battalion of Rangers, and later Representative in the Legislature of Texas, from Brown and Coleman Counties. He married Miss Mary MacNamara, daughter of Captain Michael MacNamara of the United States Army. Mrs. Sackett still lives at Camp Colorado.
The countryside is unusually picturesue—broad, rolling hills, thick with mesquite and scrub oaks, with the river winding its serpentine course through its narrow valley. On the slopes cattle and sheep graze and over all broods a drowsy quiet. But it is easy to resurrect the past in day dreams—to see the adobe walls rise out of dusty oblivion and stand up like ghosts, to hear again the faint and spectral bugle call and see the old corral thronged with lean, wicked-eyed mustangs, the buildings and the drill grounds with blue-clad figures—bronzed, hard-bitten men, with the sun and the wind of the open lands in their eyes—the old Dragoons! Nor is it hard to imagine that yonder chaparral shakes, not to the breeze, but to crawling, stealthy shapes, and that a painted, coppery face glares from the brush, and the sun glints from a tomahawk in a red hand.
But they have long faded into the night—the reckless, roistering cavalry men, the painted Comanches, the settlers in their homespun and buckskins; only the night wind whispers old tales of Camp Colorado.
A half mile perhaps from the Sackett house stands another remnant of the past—a sort of mile-stone, definitely marking the close of one age and the opening of another. It stands on a hillside in a corner of the great Dibrell ranch—a marble monument on which is the inscription:
BREEZE 21ST 31984
HEREFORD COW
BORN 1887 DIED 1903
MOTHER OF THE DIBRELL HERD
DIBRELL
This monument marks the resting place of one of the first registered, short-horn cows of central West Texas. When Breeze was born, west Texas swarmed with half-wild longhorns, descendants of those cattle the Spaniards brought from Andalusia; now one might look far before finding one of those picturesque denizens of the old ranges. Fat, white faced, short horned Herefords of Breeze’s breed and kind have replaced them, and in the vast pageant of the west, the longhorn follows buffalo and Indian into oblivion.
Letters
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Letters to the Editor:
Robert E. Howard to Adventure, Mar 20, 1924
Robert E. Howard to Adventure, Aug 20, 1924
Robert E. Howard to The Californian, Summer 1936
Robert E. Howard to Claytons Magazine, Jun 13, 1933
Robert E. Howard to The Fantasy Fan, Dec 1933
Robert E. Howard to The Fantasy Fan, Jan 1934
Robert E. Howard to The Fantasy Fan, May 1934
Robert E. Howard to Fort Worth Record, Jul 20, 1928
Robert E. Howard to The Ring, Apr 1926
Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, ca. Jan 1926
Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Jun 1927
Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, May 1928
Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Nov 1929
Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Apr 1930
Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Jan 1931
Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Mar 1932
Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Jun 1936
Personal Letters:
To Robert Barlow
To August Derleth
To Harold Preece
To E. Hoffman Price
To Donald Wandrei
Letters to the Editor:
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Robert E. Howard to Adventure, Mar 20, 1924
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I am writing for information in regard to the tribes of Mongolia.
1. What is the Mongol word for "wolf"? For "tiger"? For "sword"?
2. Is the language used by the Mongols similar to that of the Tartars?
3. Do the Kirghiz inhabit Mongolia or Chinese Turkestan?
4. Are there any Baskir tribes in Chinese Turkestan, and are they allied to the Turkomans?
5. Am I right in supposing that swords or simitars still form an important part of a Mongol or Tartar warrior's armament?
6. Do the Mongol or Tartar tribes worship Erlik, Bon or Buddha? Or all three?
7. Is it still customary for the tribes to meet at some place an engage in wrestling, horse-racing and other contests?
8. Is polygamy practiced?
9. What are the different forms of punishment by law and tribal custom?
10. What are the powers of the khan of a tribe?
11. About what is the population of Mongolia?
Robert E. Howard to Adventure, Aug 20, 1924
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1. At what period did the feudal system flourish most highly in central Europe?
2. What were the rights of the feudal lord or baron?
3. Did not a privilege known as maiden rights exist under feudal rule?
4. I have heard that until 1889 or 1890 there was in Germany a law which permitted a man to whip his wife. Is this true? If so, were there any limitations to his authority?
5. What are some of the marriage customs of Poland, Germany and Austria?
6. I understand that public whipping was one of the punishments by law formerly in use in the countries of central Europe. In what manner was this done? Were women ever whipped?
7. About what is the population of Czecho-Slovakia?
If this letter should be published in Adventure, please do not publish my name.
R. E. H.
Cross Plains, Tex.
Robert E. Howard to The Californian, Summer 1936
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Thank you very much for the copy of The Californian. I feel greatly honored that Miss Wooley should have quoted an excerpt from my serial Beyond the Black River in her article in your fine journal.
Robert E. Howard to Claytons Magazine, Jun 13, 1933
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Gentlemen:
A few weeks ago I wrote you asking a release of the British Empire rights on my stories, "People of the Dark" and "The Cairn on the Headland," published in Strange Tales. I have had no reply from you.
I note that in the Author & Journalist for November, 1932, your company is quoted as buying "all North American serial rights, but do not purchase and have no control over motion picture, radio, book, or dramatic rights."
According to this, I have the right to offer the stories mentioned to the British publishing house which has asked to look at them, with the view of bringing them out in book form. But I would like to have some sort of writing from your company, showing that I own the foreign rights.
Or, in case some special conditions prevailed in the case of Strange Tales, by which you purchased book and foreign rights, I would appreciate a release on them. I see no reason why I should not be given such release, since the magazine has been out of circulation for some months now. I realize that things are not breaking well for your company, and I sympathize with you. But things aren't breaking so good for me, either, and this may be a chance for me to make a little money through British publication. Please answer this letter, one way or another. I enclose an addressed and stamped envelope for your convenience.
Yours,
R. E. Howard
L.B. 313
Cross Plains, Texas
Robert E. Howard to The Fantasy Fan, Dec 1933
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I find the Fantasy Fan very interesting and think it has a good fortune. Anybody ought to be willing to pay a dollar for the privilege of reading, for a whole year, the works of Lovecraft, Smith, and Derleth. I am glad to see that you announce a poem by Smith in the next issue. He is a poet second to none. Weird poetry possesses an appeal peculiar to itself and the careful use of it raises the quality of any magazine. I liked very much the department of 'True Ghost Stories,' and hope you will continue it. The world is full of unexplained incidents and peculiar circumstances, the logical reasons for which are often so obscure and hidden that they are lent an illusion of the supernatural.
Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard to The Fantasy Fan, Jan 1934
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I liked the November issue very much and hope you'll publish more of Smith's poetry.
Robert E. Howard to The Fantasy Fan, May 1934
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Smith's poem in the March issue was splendid, as always. By all means, publish as many of his poems as possible; I would like to see more by Lumley, and it would be a fine thing if you could get some of Lovecraft's poetry.
Robert E. Howard to Fort Worth Record, Jul 20, 1928
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Tunney can't win. After the fight, Tom Heeney is going to be heavyweight champion of the world, not through any special virtue of his, but simply because there's a jinx on Tunney that Gene can't whip.
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